A member calls in with a coupon from your fall mailer: “20% off a new family membership.” Your membership coordinator opens Altru to process it from the back office, and there’s no obvious field for a promo code. The discount ends up being typed in as a lower payment amount, and three months later nobody can tell which memberships came from the mailer.
That’s the real problem with discounted memberships sold outside the point of sale: the discount is easy to give, but it’s hard to give consistently and harder to report on. Below is how the pieces fit together in Altru, where the gaps usually are, and a few setups that hold up.
Where discounts live in Altru
Altru handles discounts most naturally at the point of sale. Daily sales and advance sales are built around applying configured discounts to an order, and that’s where most staff are used to seeing them. Membership pricing, on the other hand, is defined in your membership programs: each level has a price, and those prices drive what a renewal or new join costs.
When a membership is entered from the revenue side (recording a payment against a constituent and applying it to a membership) rather than rung up as a sale, you’re working in a different part of the system. Whether a configured discount or promo code can be applied in that workflow depends on your version and setup, and it’s not something to assume. Before you build a process around it, test it in a sandbox or confirm with Blackbaud support. Specifically check:
- Can a discount you’ve configured for sales be applied to a membership entered outside of daily sales?
- If staff simply enter a lower amount, does Altru record the membership at the full level price with a shortfall, or at the reduced amount?
- How does the reduced amount show up in your membership and revenue reports?
The answers decide which of the approaches below makes sense for you.
Option 1: Sell discounted memberships through daily sales
If your discount works at the point of sale, the simplest fix is to route promo-code memberships through daily sales, even when the member is on the phone. Staff build the order, apply the discount, and take payment the same way they would at the front desk.
This keeps the discount attached to the transaction in a structured way, so you can report on it later instead of guessing. The tradeoff is that some back-office staff don’t normally work in daily sales, so it’s worth a short walkthrough and a one-page reference for the membership team.
Option 2: Create a promotional price or level
For a campaign with a fixed offer, such as a holiday gift membership price or a mailer discount, some organizations add a promotional level or price to the membership program for the length of the offer. Staff choose that level, the price is already correct, and your reports show exactly how many were sold.
Things to think through first:
- Renewals. Decide what level the member renews into next year. You usually want the promotional price for the first term only, then the standard level at renewal.
- Benefits. A separate level needs the same benefits as the full-price one, or cards and admission rules will behave differently.
- Cleanup. Retire the level when the offer ends so it doesn’t get picked by accident.
Option 3: Record a reduced payment, but tag it
Sometimes the discount is a one-off: a board member’s guest, a staff referral, a goodwill gesture after a bad visit. Creating a level for that is overkill, and staff will enter the lower amount directly. If you allow that, make it traceable:
- Pick one consistent way to mark the discount, such as a revenue attribute, an appeal or source code, or a standardized note. An attribute or code is better than a free-text note because you can query on it.
- Give each campaign its own value (for example, the mailer name), and keep a short list so staff aren’t inventing new ones.
- Build a query that pulls memberships where the tag is present, with the amount paid and the level’s standard price. Review it monthly.
The monthly review matters. Unstructured discounts drift: one coordinator gives 10%, another gives 20%, and finance only notices when membership revenue looks soft.
Online sales are a separate question
If the same offer is running online, check how your membership web form handles promo codes. Online and back-office sales often behave differently, and members compare notes. If someone can use a code online but the phone team can’t honor it the same way (or the reverse), you’ll hear about it. Test the online path with the same code before the mailer goes out.
A short checklist before your next membership promotion
- Confirm in a sandbox how the discount behaves for back-office membership entry.
- Choose one method per campaign: daily sales discount, promotional level, or tagged reduced payment.
- Decide what the member renews at next year, and say so in the offer.
- Set up the query you’ll use to count redemptions before the first sale, not after.
- Make sure finance knows how discounted memberships will appear in revenue reports.
Quick answers
Can staff just lower the price on a membership entered from the revenue side?
Often they can enter a smaller payment, but how Altru treats the difference depends on your configuration. Test it, and if you allow it, require a tag you can query.
Is a promotional membership level better than a discount?
For a defined campaign with a fixed price, a temporary level is usually easier to report on. For occasional one-off discounts, a tagged reduced payment is less overhead.
