A visitor buys four adult tickets for Saturday when they meant Sunday. A donor types $1,000 instead of $100. A family renews at the Individual level because the dropdown defaulted there. None of these people meant to make a mistake. They just never got a “here’s what you’re about to pay for” screen before the card was charged.
That missing step is the reason many organizations ask how to add a review and confirm page to their Altru web forms. The short answer: you probably can’t add a true separate review page inside a standard Altru form, but you can get most of the benefit with how you build and word the form, and you can catch the remaining mistakes quickly afterward.
What Altru’s web forms do today
Altru’s online forms for tickets, memberships, and donations are built to move people to payment quickly. Depending on the form, the buyer picks items, sees a cart or total, enters billing details, and submits. After payment, they land on a confirmation page and, if you’ve set it up, receive a confirmation email.
What we have not seen is a configurable option to insert a dedicated “review your order” screen between entering payment details and charging the card, the kind of step most ecommerce checkouts have. We can’t promise that no setting exists in every version or form type, so confirm it for your own site before you plan around it:
- Open each form type you use (ticketing, membership, donation) in your test or sandbox site and walk through a purchase start to finish.
- Note exactly where the total is shown and whether the buyer sees a summary before the final submit.
- Ask Blackbaud support directly whether a review step is available for that form type, and whether any change is planned.
Get the benefit of a review step without one
A review page exists to make the buyer look at their order one last time. You can push the same check into the form itself.
Put the summary where the button is
If your form shows a cart or order total, make sure it is visible near the final submit button, not only at the top of the page. On a phone, the buyer may scroll past the summary and never see it again. Test on an actual phone, not just a resized desktop browser.
Use the form text to ask for a check
Most forms let you add instructional text. A single line above the payment section does a lot of the work: “Please check your date, time, and ticket quantities before you submit. Changes after purchase may not be possible.” Keep it short so people actually read it.
Remove the defaults that cause errors
Look at which choices are pre-selected. A default membership level, a default gift amount, or a default quantity of more than one all create wrong orders from people who skim. Where you can, make the buyer choose deliberately.
Name things the way buyers think
Program, event, and price type names that make sense to staff often confuse the public. “GA Adult – Timed” means something to your box office; “Adult admission” means something to a visitor. Clear names reduce wrong selections more than any confirmation screen would.
Make the confirmation page and email do the reviewing
Since buyers can’t review before paying, make the after-payment review obvious. The confirmation page and confirmation email should repeat the important details in plain words: date and time, quantities, membership level and expiration, gift amount and designation. Add a line telling them who to contact, and how quickly, if something is wrong. A mistake caught the same day is a simple fix; one caught at the gate is not.
Plan for the mistakes that still get through
Even with a tidy form, some orders will be wrong. Decide in advance how you’ll handle them so staff aren’t improvising:
- Set an exchange and refund rule for online orders. For example, date changes allowed up to a set time before the visit, gift corrections within a set number of days.
- Watch for obvious errors. A saved query on recent web revenue, filtered for unusually large gifts or ticket quantities, lets someone spot a probable typo and reach out before the donor notices it on a statement.
- Document the correction steps. Write down who in your office can adjust or refund a web transaction in Altru, and how the change should appear in batches and revenue, so finance isn’t surprised later.
When a real review step matters
For low-cost general admission, the steps above are often enough. A true review page becomes more important when orders are large or hard to undo: high-value gifts, group visits, timed tickets with limited capacity, or memberships where the level changes the price significantly. If wrong orders are a regular source of refunds or desk time for you, that’s a sign the form itself, not just the wording, needs to change.
That is one of the reasons we built Checkouts. It replaces the Altru web form with a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets, memberships, and donations, supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, and writes the transaction back to Altru, so your records stay in Altru while the buyer gets a checkout designed around your own flow.
Quick answers
Can I add custom HTML to an Altru form to fake a review step?
Some forms allow custom text or markup, but a client-side trick that hides and reveals sections can break when Blackbaud updates the form. Test carefully in a sandbox, and treat it as fragile.
Does the confirmation email count as a review?
It’s a review after payment, not before. It still matters, because it is the fastest way buyers notice their own mistakes.
