It’s the night before a sold-out evening event. Half the tickets were bought online and emailed as e-tickets, and the event lead wants every order printed, stuffed into envelopes, and alphabetized at will call so the line moves. Then someone opens Altru’s batch ticket printing and discovers the online orders aren’t there to print.
This trips up a lot of admissions teams. Altru can print tickets for groups of advance sales orders, but orders that came in through your web forms with an e-ticket delivery method generally don’t fall into that batch. Below is what’s going on, the workarounds people actually use, and a few questions worth asking before you build a paper process around e-tickets at all.
Why online e-ticket orders get left out
Altru’s batch printing is built around the idea of a delivery method. Orders marked for mail or will call are waiting for someone at your organization to produce a physical ticket, so they show up as “needs printing.” An e-ticket order, from Altru’s point of view, has already been delivered: the guest got their tickets by email at checkout. There’s nothing left to print, so the batch process doesn’t offer it.
That logic makes sense until you have a real reason to put paper in a guest’s hand anyway. The exact filters and options on your batch print screen can vary with your configuration and Altru updates, so if you’re not sure whether a specific delivery method is included in your batch, test it: place a small online order in a sandbox or with a test constituent, then see whether it appears. If it doesn’t and you think it should, Blackbaud support can confirm whether that’s expected behavior.
Reasons teams want paper for e-ticket orders
- Pre-staged will call for a ticketed event, so staff hand over an envelope instead of looking people up.
- Guests who can’t or won’t use a phone, including older visitors and anyone whose battery died in the parking lot.
- Keepsake tickets for galas, special exhibitions, or holiday events.
- Scanning problems at the gate, where a printed backup gets people moving.
Be clear about which of these you’re solving, because the right workaround is different for each.
Workarounds that hold up
Reprint individual orders
For a handful of orders, open each online order and reprint its tickets one at a time. It’s slow, but it uses standard functionality and doesn’t touch your delivery settings. This is fine for a small event or the few guests who call ahead asking for paper.
Change the delivery method, then batch
Some teams change the delivery method on the online orders to will call (or whatever method your batch process picks up) and then run the batch. Before you do this, check two things in a sandbox: whether changing the delivery method on a completed web order is allowed in your setup, and whether it affects anything downstream, such as reports that split sales by delivery method or a confirmation that might be resent. Document the change so your end-of-day numbers still make sense to finance.
Print a will-call list instead of tickets
If the goal is a fast line, you may not need tickets at all. Build a query of the event’s orders with the purchaser’s name, order number, quantity, and price types, sort by last name, and print that. Staff check names off the list and hand over wristbands or a stamp. It’s often faster than printing and stuffing hundreds of envelopes, and it covers online and phone orders on the same sheet.
Have guests show the e-ticket, with a lookup fallback
For general admission days, the cleanest answer is usually to accept the e-ticket on a phone and train staff to look up the order by name or email when someone arrives without it. A printed backup list from the query above covers you if the network goes down.
Before you build a paper process
Printing e-tickets in bulk has costs that are easy to miss:
- Duplicate valid tickets. The guest still has the emailed version. If both are scannable, one order can effectively be used twice unless your gate process marks a ticket as redeemed the first time it’s used. Confirm how your scanning setup handles a second scan of the same barcode.
- Ticket stock and printer time. A big event can tie up the ticket printer for a long stretch. Run the batch the day before, not an hour before doors.
- Late orders. Anything bought after you print won’t be in the envelopes. Decide who handles those and how.
- Consistency. If you change delivery methods to make batching work, do it the same way every time, and write the steps down for whoever covers the next event.
Quick answers
Can I just reprint an e-ticket from the order?
Generally yes, one order at a time. The limitation people run into is printing many online e-ticket orders together in one batch.
Should I change our web forms to default to will call instead?
Only if most online buyers really do pick up at the door. Defaulting to will call means more printing and a longer line for everyone who would have been happy with an email.
