Someone buys a family membership online and wants to tell you the second adult’s name is spelled differently on their ID. Another member wants their card mailed to a relative because it’s a gift. A third wants you to know they’d like to volunteer. On a paper form they’d write it in the margin. On an Altru membership web form, there’s often nowhere to put it.
This article covers what you can realistically collect on Altru’s membership forms, how to confirm the limits for your own setup, and the workarounds that hold up when the form can’t ask the question for you.
Start with the question, not the form
Before changing anything, list every piece of information you wish members would give you at purchase. Then sort each item into one of three groups:
- Information Altru already stores in a standard field. Names, addresses, email, phone, additional household members, and gift recipient details usually fall here. If members aren’t filling them in, the issue may be form layout or labeling, not a missing field.
- Structured answers you want to report on. “How did you hear about us?”, zip-code-based interest groups, volunteer interest, preferred program areas. These are most useful as constituent attributes, because attributes can be queried and filtered later.
- Free-text comments. Special requests, accessibility notes, gift messages, “please call me.” These are useful in the moment but hard to report on, and someone has to actually read them.
This sorting matters because the right workaround is different for each group. A comment box and a reportable question are not the same problem.
What the Altru membership form gives you
Altru’s web forms are built around the transaction: pick a level, enter the member and household details, pay. You can control which levels appear and adjust some labels and text, but the forms were not designed as general-purpose survey builders. Whether your version and configuration let you add a custom question or an open comment field to a membership form specifically is something to verify rather than assume, because options differ between form types and have changed over time.
To confirm, take these steps:
- Open your membership web form in a test or sandbox environment and review every editable section, including any options for additional fields or attributes.
- Compare it with your donation form settings. Donation forms sometimes offer fields that membership forms don’t, and knowing the difference helps when you talk to support.
- Ask Blackbaud support directly: “Can a membership web form capture a custom attribute or a free-text comment, and where would the answer be stored?” The second half of that question is the one that matters.
If the answer is yes, test it end to end: submit a membership, then find the answer on the constituent or membership record and confirm a query can pull it. A field that collects data you can’t find later isn’t much help.
Workarounds that hold up
Ask right after purchase
Put a short link in the confirmation email or on the confirmation page that goes to a one- or two-question form. Ask for the member’s email so you can match responses back to their record. Response rates will be lower than an in-form question, but the people with something to say tend to use it. Assign one person to review responses weekly and record them in Altru as attributes or notes.
Use the welcome or renewal email
For structured questions like volunteer interest or how they found you, a link in the welcome email often works as well as asking at checkout, and it keeps the purchase form short. Fewer fields at checkout generally means fewer abandoned purchases.
Repurpose a field carefully
Some teams relabel an existing optional field to hold a comment. This can work in a pinch, but be cautious: if that field feeds mailings, name formatting, or reports, a member’s comment can end up printed on a card or envelope. Only do this with a field nothing else depends on, and document the decision so the next admin isn’t confused.
Ask at the desk for in-person sales
For memberships sold onsite, staff can ask the question and enter the answer as an attribute on the spot. Keep the list of allowed answers short and posted at the register so the data stays consistent.
Decide where the answers will live
Whichever route you choose, settle the storage before collecting anything:
- Constituent attributes for answers you’ll filter on, with a fixed list of values rather than free text.
- Notes for one-off comments and special requests that someone needs to act on.
- A date and source on each entry, so you can tell whether “interested in volunteering” came from last month or five years ago.
Then build a saved query for each attribute you add. If nobody runs the query, reconsider whether the question is worth asking.
A note on replacing the form
Some organizations reach the point where the Altru form itself is the constraint and look at a different front end. Social Good’s Checkouts replaces Altru web forms with a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for memberships, tickets, and donations, and writes the transaction data back to Altru. If capturing specific questions or comments is a requirement for you, bring your list to a demo and ask to see how each item would be handled and where it would land in Altru.
Quick answers
Can I just add a comment box to the membership form?
It depends on your form type and configuration. Check in a sandbox and confirm with Blackbaud support, including where the comment would be stored.
Is a follow-up survey good enough?
For most non-urgent questions, yes. For anything that affects fulfillment, like a gift card mailing address, collect it in the purchase flow or follow up by phone.
