Arboretums raise money differently from most cultural organizations. A big share of gifts arrives on foot: a visitor walks the collection on a spring morning, reads a sign about the oak restoration, and decides to give right there on their phone. Other gifts are tied to something living, like a tribute tree, a memorial bench, or a fund for a specific garden. And a lot of giving happens around seasonal moments: the plant sale, a fall color weekend, a winter lights event.
Altru handles the back office for all of that well: constituent records, revenue, designations, batches, acknowledgments, and reporting. The question for most arboretums shopping for donation software isn’t whether to replace Altru. It’s how to make the giving experience match the way your visitors actually give, while every gift still lands in Altru correctly.
What arboretum donors need from the giving page
Before comparing tools, it helps to list what the donor is doing when they give. For an arboretum, that usually looks like this:
- Giving on a phone, outdoors. QR codes on trail signs, at the visitor center, and on plant labels send people to a donation page they’ll open on a cellular connection. A long form with tiny fields loses those gifts.
- Giving to something specific. “Help replant the conifer collection” gives a donor a clearer reason to give than “Support the arboretum.” Many donors want to pick a fund, and your finance team wants that choice recorded as the right designation.
- Giving in honor or memory of someone. Tribute gifts are common at arboretums, and the honoree and notification details need to be captured cleanly so acknowledgments go out correctly.
- Giving alongside a purchase. Someone buying event tickets or a membership is often willing to add a gift, if you ask at the right moment.
Where standard Altru web forms can fall short
Altru’s built-in web forms work, and plenty of organizations run on them. Where they tend to frustrate garden and arboretum staff is presentation and flow rather than data: a form that doesn’t look like the rest of the website, a layout that is awkward on a small screen, or fewer express payment options than donors are used to elsewhere. Exactly what you can customize depends on your Altru setup, so check with Blackbaud support before assuming a limit is fixed. Even small friction on a phone can cost you gifts.
Before you buy anything, test your current donation form honestly. Open it on your own phone, on cellular data, standing in your parking lot. Count the taps from QR scan to confirmation. Try giving a tribute gift. If the experience is fine, you may only need better signage and fund names. If it’s frustrating, the checkout is the bottleneck.
What to look for in donation software that works with Altru
Gifts must write back to Altru
This is the non-negotiable. Any tool you add should post donations into Altru so the constituent, revenue, and designation are there for your development staff, without a spreadsheet import step. Ask every vendor exactly how a gift moves from their system into Altru, how often, and what happens to duplicates or failed transactions. Then confirm it in a test environment before you go live.
Designations that match your funds
Make a short list of the funds you actually want donors to choose from. Five or six clear options usually beat twenty. Check that each one maps to an existing Altru designation, and agree with finance on the default when a donor doesn’t pick.
Mobile payment options
Apple Pay and Google Pay matter most for exactly the arboretum use case: a visitor on a trail who doesn’t want to type a card number with one hand.
Fee coverage
Offering donors the choice to cover the processing fee can recover some of what you lose to card costs. Decide in advance how you’ll record the covered amount in Altru, and confirm the approach with whoever reconciles your batches.
Asking at the right moment
The checkout for tickets and memberships is one of the best places to invite a gift. Look for a way to offer a donation or membership in the cart, not on a separate page the guest has to go find.
A simple rollout plan
- Pick one campaign to start. A spring planting appeal or a single named fund is easier to measure than your whole giving program.
- Set up the designation in Altru first, then build the giving page around it.
- Print QR codes for two or three high-traffic spots and give each a slightly different link or source code so you can see which locations work.
- Run test gifts end to end, including a tribute gift and a refund, and check the resulting records in Altru before launch.
- Review after a month. Use an Altru query on that designation to compare volume and average gift with the same period under your old form.
How Social Good fits
Social Good builds tools that work alongside Altru rather than replacing it. Checkouts is a branded, mobile-friendly checkout that replaces Altru web forms for donations, tickets, and memberships, supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, and writes the data back to Altru. It can also offer membership and add-ons in the cart and let donors cover the credit card fee. For an arboretum, that covers the trailside QR gift, the donation added to a lights-event ticket, and the online appeal from the same checkout.
Quick answers
Do we need to leave Altru to get a better donation page?
No. Altru can stay where your constituent and revenue data lives; a separate checkout only changes the page the donor sees.
Can tribute gifts be handled?
Ask any vendor to demonstrate a tribute gift end to end and show you exactly where the honoree information lands in Altru. Don’t assume; test it.
