BBCON is Blackbaud’s annual user conference, and every year someone on an Altru team has to decide whether it’s worth the registration, the travel, and several days away from the building. The honest answer: it can be, but less automatically than it is for organizations running Blackbaud’s fundraising-first products. Whether it pays off for you depends on what you need to walk away with.
The basic tension for Altru shops
Blackbaud serves a lot of nonprofit segments, and the conference agenda reflects that. Much of the program has historically centered on fundraising, higher education, K-12, and the larger product lines. Altru is built for a specific slice of the sector: museums, zoos, aquariums, gardens, science centers, and historic sites that sell admission and memberships. That audience is smaller, so the Altru-specific content is usually a smaller share of the agenda.
That doesn’t make the trip a waste. It means you should look at the published session list before you register, not after. Count how many sessions are actually about Altru, or about work you do every day in Altru (memberships, admissions, queries, reporting, donor stewardship), versus sessions about products you don’t own. If you can’t fill most of your time slots with relevant sessions, plan the trip around people instead of the agenda, or skip it.
Who tends to get the most out of it
- Newer Altru administrators. If you inherited Altru from a predecessor and are still figuring out why things were set up the way they were, time in a room with other Altru admins is hard to replicate. Ten minutes of “how do you handle lapsed members?” over lunch can save a week of trial and error.
- Development staff at Altru organizations. Fundraising is a major focus of the program, and much of that thinking (stewardship, donor retention, moves management) applies regardless of which database you use.
- Organizations weighing a change. If you’re deciding whether to stay on Altru, add tools around it, or move to something else, the conference is a place to ask Blackbaud staff direct questions about product direction and to hear how peers are handling the same decision.
- Teams with a specific problem to solve. Going with a short list of concrete questions (“our group sales invoicing is a mess,” “our membership query counts don’t match finance”) makes vendor halls, office hours, and hallway conversations far more productive.
Who might spend the money elsewhere
An experienced admin who already knows Altru well, at an organization with a tight professional development budget, may get more value from a sector conference. Museum, zoo and aquarium, garden, and science center associations all run their own national and regional meetings, and those agendas are built around admissions, membership, visitor experience, and operations at institutions like yours. You won’t get Altru training there, but you’ll be in rooms full of people whose problems look exactly like yours.
The Altru knowledge itself can often be found without traveling: Blackbaud’s online community and knowledge base, Altru user groups (some regional groups meet informally or online), webinars, and peers at nearby institutions you can simply call. In practice, the fastest answer to an Altru question is often another admin who has already solved the same problem.
How to make the decision
- Write down the two or three things you need to learn or decide this year. If none of them are Altru-specific, a sector conference may be the better fit.
- Check the agenda against that list. Look for sessions on Altru by name, plus general sessions that genuinely apply to a visitor-serving organization.
- Price the full trip, not just registration. Travel, hotel, meals, and the cost of covering your work while you’re out. Then compare it with the alternatives above.
- Ask other Altru admins whether they’re going. If a handful of peers will be there, the networking value goes up considerably. If you’d be the only Altru person in most rooms, it goes down.
- Check for a virtual or on-demand option. Formats change from year to year, so confirm the current format and pricing directly with Blackbaud rather than assuming.
If you go, make it count
- Bring a written list of your messiest Altru problems, with screenshots or query definitions if they’re not sensitive. Specific questions get specific answers.
- Find the Altru people early. Ask session presenters and Blackbaud staff whether there’s an Altru meetup or table, and go to it.
- Talk to product staff about the things that cost your team the most time. Be concrete about the workflow and the hours involved; that’s more useful to everyone than a general complaint.
- Collect contacts, not just slides. The peer you meet who runs memberships at a similar-sized zoo is worth more over the next year than any single session.
- Within a week of getting back, write a one-page summary for your team: what you learned, what you’ll change, and who you can call. Without that, most of the value fades quickly.
The short version
BBCON is worth it for Altru users when you go with a clear purpose, the agenda has enough Altru and visitor-serving content to fill your days, and you’ll actually connect with other Altru organizations. It’s harder to justify as a general annual trip, especially for experienced admins with limited budgets. Look at the agenda, price the whole trip, ask your peers, and compare it honestly with a sector conference and the free resources you already have.
