A parent calls on Monday morning to enroll two kids in next month’s summer camp week. Another family already paid by check at the front desk and needs to be added to the roster. A board member’s grandchild is getting a complimentary spot. None of them came through your website, and all of them have to end up on the same class list in Altru.
Preregistered programs (camps, classes, workshops, lecture series, anything with a fixed roster and named attendees) behave differently from daily admission in Altru. This article covers how staff typically get people onto those rosters from the back office, where the friction usually shows up, and how to keep the roster accurate when registrations come in from several directions.
How preregistered programs differ from daily admission
Daily admission is about counting heads: a ticket is sold, scanned, and done. A preregistered program cares about who is attending. You need each registrant’s name, often their age, emergency contact, or allergy notes, and you need to know which constituent paid for which child.
In Altru, a seat in a preregistered program is still sold as a ticket for a scheduled event. That means registration and payment are bundled together: the registrant normally lands on the roster as part of a sales transaction, not through a standalone “add person to class” screen. Teams coming from camp or school-registration software often expect the opposite, which is where most of the confusion starts.
Whether your version of Altru offers any way to add a registrant to a preregistered event without a sale behind it is worth confirming directly. Ask Blackbaud support or test it in a sandbox before you build a process around it. The approaches below assume you are working through sales.
Ways staff register people from the back office
Advance sales for individual families
For a phone or walk-in registration, advance sales is the usual route. Staff look up (or create) the purchasing constituent, choose the program and the specific event date, select the price type, and then enter the registrant details for each seat. The payer and the attendee can be different people, which matters for camps where a parent pays and children attend.
The step that gets skipped most often is the registrant information itself. If staff rush past it, you end up with a roster of seats tied to the parent’s name and no idea which child is in which session.
Group sales for schools, scouts, and organizations
When an outside group books an entire session, or a block of seats, a group sales reservation is usually a better fit. It lets you hold capacity, take a deposit, and finalize counts later. Collecting individual names for a group can be clumsy, so decide up front whether you actually need named attendees for groups or only a count and a lead contact.
Free and complimentary registrations
Because registration rides on a sale, comped spots still need a transaction. Common approaches are a dedicated $0 price type for staff or scholarship seats, or a discount that brings the price to zero. Pick one method and stick with it, so your revenue reports and your scholarship counts stay clean. Avoid having staff improvise with a different payment method each time.
Payments taken outside the sale
Checks mailed in, invoices paid later, or a family paying half now and half next week all cause trouble. If your setup does not support the payment pattern you need, record the registration at the point you actually collect money, and keep a short holding list (a shared spreadsheet is fine) for families who are promised a seat but have not paid. Review that list daily during registration season so held seats don’t quietly oversell the session.
Keeping the roster trustworthy
- Write a one-page desk procedure. Which price types to use, which fields are mandatory, and who is allowed to comp a seat. Seasonal staff will follow a checklist far more reliably than verbal training.
- Make the payer and attendee rule explicit. Decide whether children get their own constituent records or live only as registrant details on the sale. Own records are better for repeat campers and household relationships; skipping them is faster at the desk. Either is defensible, but mixing them is not.
- Build a roster query. A query of registrants by program and event date, including any custom fields you collect, gives instructors an up-to-date list without anyone exporting a report by hand each morning.
- Check capacity before confirming by phone. Back-office and online sales draw from the same capacity, so a seat that was open five minutes ago may be gone. Confirm availability in Altru while the caller is still on the line.
- Handle transfers as exchanges or refunds. When a family moves from week two to week three, process it through Altru’s exchange or refund tools rather than editing notes. Otherwise the old session still shows the child and the new one doesn’t.
Things to test before registration opens
- Register one child from the back office and one online for the same session, then confirm both appear on the roster with full details.
- Process a $0 scholarship seat and check how it shows up in your revenue and attendance reports.
- Move a registrant to a different date and confirm capacity updates on both sessions.
- Run your roster query and hand it to an instructor. If they have to ask a question about it, add the missing field now.
Quick answers
Can I add someone to a preregistered program without charging them?
Generally you still create a transaction, using a $0 price type or a full discount. If you need registrations with no transaction at all, confirm with Blackbaud support whether your setup allows it.
Should a parent and child share one record?
No. Keep the parent as the purchaser and capture the child as the registrant, ideally on their own constituent record linked to the household, so next year’s registration starts with their history.
Why don’t phone registrations show up on our instructor list?
Usually because registrant details weren’t entered at the time of sale, or the list is coming from a report that only shows purchasers. Rebuild the roster from a query on registrants, not buyers.
