An arboretum sells membership differently from a museum or a zoo. At many arboretums the grounds are free or cheap to walk, so a membership isn’t really an admission pass. People join for the plant sale preview, the class discounts, the reciprocal garden admission when they travel, and the feeling of supporting a place they visit every week in April and October. Your membership software has to fit that kind of value, not just scan a card at a gate.
If you already run Altru, the good news is that the core membership engine is there. The question is usually what to add around it, and what to leave alone. This page is written for arboretum membership and development staff weighing that decision.
What Altru already covers for an arboretum
Before shopping for anything, be clear about what you already own. Altru handles the fundamentals most arboretums need:
- Membership programs and levels, including household memberships with multiple cardholders.
- Constituent records and households, so a member who also donates, takes a pruning class, and volunteers is one person, not four.
- Renewal and expiration settings defined on each membership program, so terms are applied consistently.
- Daily sales and advance sales for admission, events, and class registrations where you charge for them.
- Queries, smart fields, and reports for renewal lists, lapsed-member lists, and board reporting.
Replacing any of that rarely makes sense. Moving your member history out of Altru means losing the single view of each household that development work depends on.
Where arboretums tend to feel the gaps
The friction usually shows up at the edges, where members interact with you directly rather than where staff work inside Altru.
Seasonal renewal spikes
Arboretum joins cluster around spring bloom and fall color, which means renewals cluster a year later. A small membership office can end up processing a large share of the year’s renewals in a few weeks. Anything that lets members handle their own renewal online, without a phone call or a mailed form, pays off most in those weeks.
Members who don’t know their own status
Because nobody checks a card at the gate on a free-admission day, members often lose track of when they expire. They find out at the plant sale checkout, when the member discount doesn’t apply. A place where members can look up their level, expiration date, and household cardholders on their own heads off that conversation.
Benefits that live outside admission
Plant sale early access, class discounts, garden shop discounts, and reciprocal admission at other gardens all depend on a member proving they’re current, often somewhere other than your front desk. A visiting member at a reciprocal garden needs a card that shows a valid expiration date. Mobile wallet cards and a quick scan at your own events help here, but confirm how any tool reads expiration from Altru before you rely on it.
Online renewal forms that don’t feel like your site
Many arboretums find that the default web forms don’t match the rest of their website, especially on phones. That matters more than it sounds: a renewal that starts from a reminder email and ends on an unfamiliar-looking page loses people.
What to look for in an add-on
When evaluating any membership tool that sits alongside Altru, ask these questions directly and get demos with your own data where possible:
- Does it write back to Altru, or keep its own copy? A tool that maintains a separate member list will drift out of sync. You want renewals and profile changes landing in Altru constituent and membership records.
- Is the data live? If a member renews at the desk this morning, they should see the new expiration date online this afternoon, not after a nightly export.
- Does it respect your program rules? Renewal windows, upgrades between levels, and household cardholder limits should come from how your programs are configured, not be re-entered in a second place.
- Can members handle the common jobs alone? Check status, renew, upgrade, and update an address or email. Those cover most of the calls a membership office takes.
- Who maintains it when Altru changes? Ask how the vendor handles Altru updates and what support looks like during your spring rush.
If you aren’t sure whether Altru can already do something you need, test it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before paying for a tool to do it.
Practical setup tips for arboretum programs
- Time renewal reminders to your seasons. A reminder that lands just before the spring plant sale gives members a concrete reason to act.
- Decide how you treat members who renew a few weeks late. Check how your program settings handle late renewals in a sandbox first, so desk staff and the online path give the same answer.
- Build a saved query of members expiring in the next 60 days, and review it before every member event.
- Decide which household members get cards, and make sure your online renewal path and desk staff follow the same rule.
How Social Good fits
Our Membership Portal gives Altru members a place to view their status, renew, upgrade, and update their profile online against live Altru data. Altru stays where your membership records live; the portal is the member-facing layer, which is most useful for arboretums whose members rarely pass through a gate where staff could check them.
Quick answers
Do we need separate membership software if we use Altru?
Usually not for managing memberships. Arboretums add tools for the member-facing side: self-service renewal, status lookup, and digital cards.
Will an add-on change our membership program setup?
It shouldn’t. A well-built add-on reads your existing programs and levels from Altru rather than asking you to rebuild them.
