Gift memberships sound like an easy win until the first batch of online gift orders arrives with the purchaser’s address in the recipient fields, a recipient who already has an active membership, or a card nobody knows where to mail. At that point a lot of membership managers want to take the gift option off the website and handle gifts by phone or in person instead.
Whether you can do that cleanly depends on how your Altru membership web form is set up. Here’s how to check, what your options are if there’s no simple off switch, and how to keep the gifts that still come through from turning into cleanup work.
Start by confirming what your form actually allows
Altru’s membership web forms are configured per form, and the options available have changed over time. Before you plan a workaround, find out whether your version lets you remove or hide the gift choice directly:
- Open the membership web form in your web forms area and review every setting tied to the purchase type: who the membership is for, recipient fields, and gift messaging.
- Check whether the gift path is tied to specific membership levels. On some setups, which levels appear on the form and how they’re offered matters more than any single gift setting.
- Test in a sandbox or a copy of the form, not your live page. Change one setting, load the form as a visitor, and see whether the gift option still shows.
- If you can’t find a setting, ask Blackbaud support directly whether gift purchasing can be turned off on a membership web form in your current release. A short written answer from support saves you from guessing.
We aren’t going to claim there’s a native toggle, because we can’t promise it’s there for every organization. If support confirms there isn’t one, the options below are what’s left.
Workarounds when there’s no off switch
Hide it on the page, carefully
If your form allows custom styling or custom HTML around it, some organizations hide the gift selection visually. This is fragile. A form update can change the markup and bring the option back without warning, and hiding something on the page doesn’t stop a determined visitor from reaching it. If you go this way, put a recurring reminder on the calendar to re-test the form after every Altru update.
Use a separate form for gifts, or none at all
Another approach is to keep your main membership form focused on buying for yourself and route gift buyers somewhere else: a phone number, an email address, or a membership office request form that staff process manually. You lose the online convenience, but every gift gets a human check before it posts to a constituent record.
Make gifts seasonal
Many gift membership problems cluster around the holidays. Some organizations leave the gift path off most of the year and turn it on, with clear instructions and better staffing, for a defined window in November and December. If that’s your plan, decide the dates ahead of time and write down who is responsible for switching it on and off.
Rewrite the page copy
If you can’t remove the option, you can at least reduce bad orders. State plainly on the page that recipient name and address must belong to the person receiving the membership, explain when the card will arrive, and say who to contact if the recipient is already a member.
Catch the gifts that still come through
Even with the option removed or hidden, gifts will turn up from old links, cached pages, or staff entering them at the desk. A little monitoring keeps them from piling up:
- Build a membership query for recent online transactions where the purchaser and the member are different constituents. Run it weekly and review it alongside your web form processing.
- Check for duplicates before you process. Gift orders are a common source of new constituent records for people who already exist in Altru, usually with a slightly different spelling or email address. Search before you accept the new record.
- Look for recipients who are already members. Decide in advance whether a gift extends their current term or gets refunded, so staff aren’t improvising.
- Agree on who owns fulfillment. If a gift needs a mailed card or a personal note, name the person or team who sends it.
Decide why you’re turning it off
It helps to be clear about the reason, because it changes the fix. If the problem is bad recipient data, better page copy and a review query may be enough. If it’s fulfillment workload, a seasonal window may work. If it’s fraud or chargebacks, removing the online path entirely and talking to your payment processor makes more sense. Write the reason down with whatever you decide, so the next person who manages membership knows why gifts aren’t online.
Where Social Good fits
If you’re rethinking how memberships are sold online anyway, Checkouts is a branded, mobile-friendly checkout that replaces Altru web forms for tickets, memberships, and donations, with the data written back to Altru. It’s a reasonable time to ask us how gift purchases would be presented in your setup before you rebuild the page.
Quick answers
Will hiding the gift option affect memberships already sold as gifts?
No. Changing what the form shows only affects new web transactions. Existing gift memberships and their constituent records stay as they are.
Can staff still sell gift memberships at the desk?
Turning off the online path doesn’t have to change in-person sales. Confirm in your sandbox that any setting you change applies only to the web form, not your daily sales workflow.
