Someone just bought tickets or joined as a member. They’re happy and they’re paying attention, which makes it a good time to ask them to follow you on Instagram or share the event with a friend. The trouble is that Altru web forms aren’t built around this. There’s no “social links” field to fill in, so you have to work out where links can actually live and where they’d do more harm than good.
Below is how to think about it, where links tend to fit, and how to check what your own Altru setup allows.
First, decide where the links belong
It’s tempting to drop a row of social icons across the top of every form. Don’t. A ticket or donation form has one job, which is getting someone to finish paying. A link out to Facebook in the middle of that flow is an exit door. Some people will click it, scroll for ten minutes, and never come back to the cart.
Social links work best in places where the transaction is already finished:
- The confirmation or thank-you page shown after a successful purchase or gift.
- The confirmation or acknowledgment email that follows.
- Your own website page that hosts or links to the form, usually in the site footer, where visitors expect to find them anyway.
On the form itself, a small, quiet footer link is about as far as you should go.
Where Altru gives you room to add them
Altru web forms let you customize their appearance and text to some degree. That usually includes header and footer content, styling, and the messages shown on the form and after it’s submitted. How much raw HTML those areas accept, and whether links and images get through, depends on the form type and how your forms were set up. These are the places to look:
Header and footer content
If your forms use a shared header or footer to match your website, that’s the natural spot for a small row of text links like “Instagram · Facebook · YouTube.” Because it’s shared, you edit it once and every form picks it up. Check whether the field accepts HTML anchor tags or only plain text.
Confirmation messages
The text shown after a completed transaction is the best spot on the form side. Something like “Thanks for joining! Follow us on Instagram for behind-the-scenes updates” with a single link will get more clicks than a block of icons, because it gives people a reason to follow.
Confirmation and acknowledgment emails
This is often the easiest win. Whatever tool sends your eTickets, membership confirmations, or gift acknowledgments, add a short social line to the template footer. People open eTicket emails more than once, sometimes at your front gate, so that footer gets seen.
Not sure what your forms accept? Make a copy of a low-traffic form, or use a sandbox if you have one. Add a test link to the footer and confirmation message, then run a real test transaction on both a phone and a laptop. If the link gets stripped out or shows up as raw code, ask Blackbaud support what that area allows instead of experimenting on a live form.
Details that are easy to miss
- Open external links in a new tab on any page that’s still part of the purchase flow, so the form stays open behind them.
- Use text, or icons with text labels. Icons with no label are harder for screen-reader users, and if the icon image is hosted somewhere that breaks later, you’re left with an empty box.
- Add tracking parameters (UTM tags) to each link so your web analytics can show whether people who clicked came from a confirmation page or an email.
- Keep the list short. Two or three channels you actually post on is better than six where the last post was two years ago.
- Follow links and share links are different things. A follow link sends people to your profile. A share link pre-fills a post about an event. Share links make more sense on event ticket confirmations, and follow links make more sense for memberships and donations.
- Keep a list of every place you put links. When you change a handle or drop a platform, you’ll need to update all of them, and links in form text are easy to forget.
When the form itself is the limit
Sometimes you’ll test everything above and find that the form areas you need won’t take links, or the forms just don’t look like the rest of your website. If that’s the problem, social links aren’t really what needs fixing. You need more control over the purchase pages themselves.
That’s one of the reasons organizations use Social Good Checkouts. It’s a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets, memberships, and donations that replaces Altru web forms and writes the transactions back to Altru. Because the checkout matches your own site, adding a thank-you message with your social channels is an ordinary design decision rather than a workaround.
Quick answers
Is there a built-in social media setting on Altru web forms?
Not that we’re aware of as a dedicated feature. Most teams add links through the customizable text and header or footer areas. Confirm what your version allows by testing on a copy of a form.
Should social links go on the payment step?
Generally no. Put them after payment, on the confirmation page and in the follow-up email, where they won’t pull people away before they finish.
