“My mother uses a wheelchair, can we get a ramp entrance?” “This membership is a gift, please don’t mail the card to me.” “We’re arriving late because of school pickup.” Visitors want to tell you things when they buy online, and a free-text comments box is the obvious place for them to do it. The trouble is that Altru’s web forms don’t handle this the same way across every kind of sale, and a comment that lands somewhere nobody looks is worse than no box at all.
This guide covers what to check in your own Altru setup, the workarounds that hold up in practice, and how to make sure comments actually reach the person who needs to act on them.
Start by mapping which forms can take a comment today
Altru has separate web form types for ticket sales, memberships, donations, and events, and they don’t all offer the same set of fields. Some form types give you more room to add questions or notes than others. Rather than relying on anyone’s memory (including ours), open each live form in your Altru web form setup and write down:
- Form type (tickets, membership, donation, event registration).
- Whether it offers any free-text field for the buyer, and what it’s labeled.
- Where that text ends up after a test purchase: on the constituent record, on the revenue or order, in a note, or only in the form submission itself.
That last column is the one people skip, and it’s the one that matters. Run a real test transaction in a sandbox or with a staff card you refund afterward, then search for the comment in Altru. If you can’t find it in under a minute, your front desk won’t find it during a shift either.
If a form type has no comment option and you can’t tell whether one can be added, ask Blackbaud support directly and give them the exact form type. It’s a quicker answer than trial and error.
Workarounds when a form has no comments box
Ask after the sale instead of during it
For many comment types (accessibility needs, arrival time, a party name), the information is only useful if it reaches staff before the visit. Your confirmation email can include a short line such as “Need an accessible entrance or have a special request? Reply to this email or call us.” It’s low-tech, but replies go to a monitored inbox and a person reads them.
Use a separate request form for special cases
Gift memberships, accessibility requests, and group questions often deserve their own simple form linked from the purchase page. You give up having the comment attached to the order automatically, so staff need a habit of matching the request to the Altru constituent and adding a note there.
Route complicated orders to group sales
If buyers regularly try to type instructions like “split this across two school buses,” the real problem is that those orders don’t belong in a general-admission web form. Pointing them to your group sales process gets them a human from the start.
Decide where comments live in Altru
However the text is captured, pick one home for it. Most admins choose between two options:
- A note on the constituent record. Good for things that stay true over time, like accessibility needs or “do not mail.” Anyone who opens the record sees it.
- Something tied to the specific order or revenue. Better for one-time details like “arriving at 2:30.” It doesn’t clutter the constituent record with stale information.
Mixing the two without a rule is how comments get lost. Write the rule down and share it with whoever processes online orders.
Make sure someone reads them
A comments box creates an implied promise. If a donor writes “in memory of my father, please notify my sister” and nothing happens, that’s a real problem, not a minor data issue.
- Build a query that pulls recent online transactions where the comment or note is not blank. Include the buyer, the date, the item purchased, and the comment text.
- Assign an owner for each sale type: membership staff check membership comments, development checks donation comments, visitor services checks tickets.
- Set a cadence. Daily for ticket sales (visits can be same-day), every few days for memberships and donations.
- Close the loop. When a comment needs a reply, record that it was handled, so the next person doesn’t email the guest a second time.
Labeling helps too. A box labeled “Comments” invites anything. “Anything we should know before your visit?” or “Gift message or tribute details” gets more useful answers and fewer “thanks!” entries.
If you’re replacing your web forms anyway
Some organizations move off Altru’s native web forms for other reasons, such as mobile layout, branding, or wallet payments, and treat a consistent comments field as one item on that checklist. Social Good’s Checkouts is a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets, memberships, and donations that writes its data back to Altru. If you evaluate it or any similar tool, ask the same question you asked of your current forms: when a buyer leaves a note, where exactly does it show up in Altru, and can you query it?
Quick answers
Is there one setting that adds comments to every Altru web form?
Not that we’d promise. Each form type is configured separately, so check each one and confirm with Blackbaud support if a type seems to lack the option.
Should the comments field be required?
No. A required free-text box adds friction at checkout and fills your data with “n/a.” Keep it optional and specific.
