Rick Hernandez

How to assign a membership level to a membership card

May 13, 2022 By Rick Hernandez

Introduction

Learn to assign a membership level to a membership card to accurately link different membership card designs to one email. Make sure that you have the Program name and Level matched and spelled the same in Altru. This will make sure that every time this specific program name and level are referenced, this specific membership card design will show up.

Steps on how to assign a membership level to a membership card

1: Go to your Social Good Software account and log in.

2: Proceed to Development.

How to assign a membership level to a membership card

3: Click the Membership Card Designer. Select the membership card design that you want to link to the program and level you prepared.

4: Proceed to Settings located on the upper right side of the window.

5: Below the section “Add a membership program and level” you put on the Program name and membership level the same as Altru to make it work. Save by clicking the plus (+) sign.

Program Name: Access Membership
Level: Starter/Inicial

Summary

Link a program name and level to a specific membership card design. This will make sure that every time an email is sent out containing that program name and level, the membership card design link to it will show up.

You don’t have to waste time creating separate emails for different digital membership card designs. You only need to create one and link all membership card designs to it. With this, you save time and effort when manually doing it.

Please reach out to us through our support channel if you have more questions.

How to add the eTicket link to the default acknowledgment email in Altru

April 26, 2022 By Rick Hernandez

How-to-add-eTicket-email-to-the-default-acknowledgement-email-compressed Download

In this guide, you will be able to learn how to add the eTicket link to the acknowledgment email in Altru. With this, your constituents will be able to download and check it easily as it was already in the transactional email sent to them.

Steps on How to Add eTicket Link to the acknowledgment email

1: Go to your Altru account and proceed to Web.

2: Click on Default acknowledgment email.

how to add the eTicket link to the acknowledgment email

4: A dialog box will pop out which helps change the link into eTicket link inside the email.

5: You can add the link anywhere you are comfortable inside the email. For illustration, we will add this link below the Receipt Grid.

6: Add the merge field by going to Insert and clicking the merge fields.

7: A dialog box will pop out in which you need to click on Summary > eTickets.

8: From the dialog box under eTicket, drag the Begin link to eTicket page and drop it at the beginning of Download eTicket. Same with End link to eTicket page but drop it at the end part.

9: Once done, click on Save.

The link to your eTicket is now added to your transactional email. If you have more questions or clarifications please reach out to us through our support channel.

Membership Portal Merging Options

April 23, 2022 By Rick Hernandez

How to enable email automation

April 16, 2022 By Rick Hernandez

If you are done with your emails and are now ready to send out all your outbound messages, the email automation of Email Designer is very helpful. All you have to do is to enable this function and it will do the work of sending messages on your behalf. Make sure you follow the steps below for the best result.

Email automation process:

1: Log in to your Social Good Software account.

2: Click on the Email Designer on the left side of the navigation.

3: Find the template which you would like to enable the outbound messages for. In this example, we will be using “Tickets Sold Today”.

4: Click on the “Settings” option at the top of the navigation.

5: In the settings section, you will see the option “Start sending emails?”. Enable this function and click on the “Save Settings” button.

6: You can go to Preview to see all the emails you are currently sending and the Activity tab for the emails already sent out.

Summary

Make sure that you troubleshoot and that you are satisfied with your emails before you turn the option on. Once you enable the email automation, the Social Good Software application will monitor the query you built and send out emails every 5 minutes on your behalf. You don’t have to do anything.

If you don’t understand something or you have more questions please reach out to us through our support channel.

How to create an attribute with Altru for a mailing list

April 13, 2022 By Rick Hernandez

Create an attribute with Altru for a mailing list to add greater dimension to your constituents. With this attribute, you can tag someone with specific mailing lists. You can also include and exclude individuals using this attribute. This is useful when sorting email lists out especially with events or tiered membership level perks.

Creating an attribute with Altru for a mailing list

1: Go to your Altru account.

2: Proceed to Administration.

3: Move on attribute categories.

Create an attribute with Altru for a mailing list

4: Click on Add.

5: A dialog box will pop out where you need to supply the needed details. When you create a new name for an attribute, keep in mind that it should be easy to understand and correspond to the list you are creating it for. Once done, click Save.

Name: Must after the list you are creating for
Record type: Constituent (make this attribute attach to all constituents)
Data type: Yes/No
✅Allow only one per record

Note: Make sure to check the box that allows only one per record to work this attribute correctly. This will override whenever someone opts in or out of the specific attribute.

If you want to create another attribute, just click on the Add button or repeat the process above.

Summary

Knowing how to create an attribute with Altru for a mailing list is helpful in organizing and sorting mailing lists so you can create more targeted emails for a more targeted audience. We also recommend that you add all the attributes that you can use throughout your list for proper segmentation.

If something is unclear in this article or if you have other questions, please contact us anytime!

eTicket email Query for Altru

April 11, 2022 By Rick Hernandez

Merging Records for Digital Membership Cards

February 9, 2022 By Rick Hernandez

Duplicate data cannot be avoided but it is also necessary to maintain a clean list for your marketing campaign. A clean record can only be achieved if you remove, update and do merging of records.

Altru looks up to constituents based on the primary information like first name, last name, and email address. If there are multiple records in the system, it will be hard to identify which data to display on the Membership Card. In this article, we will show you how to deal with duplicate records and the process of merging of data.

Duplicate Records

Assuming that you have two records with different first names which resulted in duplicate data. When you have these duplicates and you need to email this member for the first time then you have to pick one of the two records without deduping your data.

***Note:*** *This is for illustration only. Typically the ID contains 16 digits but in this case, we will use A-1 for the first record and B-2 for the second record.*

In this example, we will pick the record A-1 and send an email that contains a link called A-1. If the member clicks on the email, she will get the membership card referencing the record A-1.

Merging of Data

if you decided to keep Kimberly Thompson and merge the two records then get rid of all the duplicates.
In this example, Kim will be added as an alias under record B-2. No need to bring over Thompson because it already existed. In the case of the System ID – they can only have one.
This scenario shows that if you merge over record A-1 into record B-2, record A-1 will be deleted. The record ID that you are merging into will also be kept, which is the system ID of B-2. If this data was already merged and the member clicks again the link referencing record A-1 then she will get an error 404 because A-1 doesn’t exist anymore.
Once the merge of records happened, the Membership Record in Altru which was originally attached to record A-1 was now attached to record B-2.
Kimberly must manually tag to let her know that there are changes made with her record in the Altru system.
Once Kimberly was manually tagged, the query will pick it up and take it over to the email which now contains the link for record B-2. When Kimberly clicks on the link, she will receive a Membership Card referencing record B-2.
Take note that it is necessary to manually tag the member to re-communicate.

How to do manual tagging of emails for resends in Altru for digital membership cards

February 2, 2022 By Rick Hernandez

Manual Tagging comes in handy when guests who already received an email but lost access to it due to various reasons like they accidentally deleted the email or lost access to their email address and requested to receive the same email again.

Keep on reading to learn more about manual tagging. To illustrate, we will be resending a Digital Membership card to a member. To do that, just follow the step below:

1: Open your Altru account and find the membership record of the guest who requested to resend an email.

2: Proceed to Documentation at the bottom part and delete the welcome email attached before you click on Add then select Note.

3: A dialog box will pop out. Click on the drop-down menu for Type and select Resend Welcome Email. Click on Save.

Once you manually tagged a guest, Altru will pick it up on the query which is looking at sales orders that do not have a note type and automatically send the email.

No need to switch from Altru to Social Good Software to resend the email. Just simply tag the guest in Altru, and delete the previous welcome email attached. The moment that note type is added, Altru will resend the email to the guest.

How to preview pages with the Online Template

February 2, 2022 By Rick Hernandez

Online Template is an easy-to-use tool to customize your web forms. In this documentation, we will discuss how to use the tool and its available components. Also discussed is how to preview pages with the Online Template without swapping out those web forms in Altru and before these forms go live.

With this tool, you will be able to preview your web forms and anything that is being sold online. Remember that this is just a preview. Not everything works as it would be in the production because there are limitations.

We will not be able to show you exactly everything from checkout to cart and confirmation to the credit card but we can show you the first part which is the checkout side. When you are already in this step, the remaining work is for you to preview the pages and make sure that everything looks good and meets your expectations before we move forward.

Online Template Designer

It was already a pre-configured tool but if you want to make changes, you can use the little icons below.

Assets

You can upload your favicon, logo for your header and footer, background, and things like that. You also have the option to upload custom fonts and embed codes to generate CSS code, header code, and footer code.

Settings

Below are the options that you can turn on if you want to include values but the SGS team is the one responsible for this, however, if you want to confirm email addresses, URLs, and things like that, you can go here to check it out.

Preview pages with the Online Template

Step 1: Copy the URL of the page that you want to preview from Blackbaud.

Step 2: Go back to the Online Template tool and click on Add URL.

Step 3: A dialog box will pop out where you can type in the name of the page and paste the copied URL then click Add.

Step 4: On the Preview page there is now an item added. Wait until the designer loads the page for preview which will take a while. Essentially what we did is downloading the page from Blackbaud, apply all the stylistic changes then preview the page.

Step 5: You can click on the Save icon at the bottom and wait as the designer loads the page. In this case, there are no changes applied yet so the page loaded to the designer is totally identical to the Blackbaud. But if you click on the new tab icon, the URL is totally different from the Blackbaud so you can now actually share this link with your colleagues to preview.

Step 6: Let us try to apply some fixes to the webform and see what it looks like. On the Setting side, we will enable the following:

✅Template Fixes
✅Translation menu
✅Empty Cart
✅Member dialog
✅WCAG 2.1
✅Email Validation

Step 7: Go back to the designer and wait as it reloads the preview. Click on the new tab icon to better see the changes made and make adjustments accordingly.

You now have a better understanding of how Online Templates work. The purpose of this documentation is not to configure the template but to show you the process of adding different pages to preview and make necessary changes before your web forms go live.

Types of emails for eTickets

January 27, 2022 By Rick Hernandez

eTicket-email-options Download

Introduction

Email designer is an app that allows you to customize and send automated emails for your Altru transactions. This tool is useful for different types of emails for eTickets because through it you can send messages with tickets in PDF form. Guests are no longer need to click on the link to download the ticket since it was already replaced by a ticket in PDF form.

In this guide, you will learn what are the types of emails for eTickets, the components of each email, and some of the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) that we received regarding this topic.

How to set-up your emails in three (3) steps:

1. Write your email in Google Docs or Microsoft word

We recommend that you first draft your email to Google docs or Microsoft word and check that you include all the merge fields that you need.

2. Create your query and note type with Altru for your email

Make sure that your query identifies who the receivers of the email are. Create a Note type in Altru to be able to monitor if the emails were sent.

3. Setup the Email Designer with your content and query.

To be able to send out this email, put together the content and the query to the Email Designer.

The process of setting up your emails starts from running the query and feeding it to the Email Designer. If there are individuals who match the query, an email for that particular person will be sent out. Once the email was sent out, the app will grab a copy of it and attach it to Altru as Note Type so there will be an email attached inside the particular sales order.

Three (3) Types of Emails for eTickets

1. eTicket Email is great for sending out a PDF that auto generated an eTicket number and a PDF with their tickets.

There are two emails that Altru sends out. The first email is about what the guests’ purchased and the second is the link to their eTicket.

With the use of the Email Designer, we will replace the second email that Altru sends which is the link to their ticket with our eTicket email where we will instead attach a PDF to the tickets.

2. Reminder Email is great for sending out a reminder of their upcoming visit with tickets attached as a PDF. This email can go out the day of or one day before.

3. Post Visit Email is great for following up with guests who have visited. You can send a membership offer or just collect feedback on their experience.

It is an email to thank the guests for visiting. Typically sent out the day or the following day after the visit.You can send this email without PDF or tickets.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. Do these emails account for sales orders over the phone, online and in person?

The discussed type of emails above will account for all three types of sales methods. You can also exclude a specific sales method at the query level.

2. If I manually resend an email, will my tickets be updated?

Yes, If you resend an email the tickets will be generated at the time the email is being sent.

3. If I delete the note type from the sales order, will the email go out with the right tickets?

Yes, the query is looking at sales orders that do not have a note type and sends an email. If you remove the note type from the sales order, another version of an email will get off with another PDF. Typically, you won’t be doing this unless you need to resend it.

4. If I open the eTicket preview on the Email Designer, will I see the latest ticket available?

Yes, you will see the latest ticket available whenever you click on the link

The purpose of this documentation is to help you understand the three (3) types of eTicket emails, and how these emails work so that it will be easier for you to create and set up eTicket emails based on their type for your organization.