Gardens raise money in ways that don’t look much like a typical nonprofit’s annual fund. A visitor walks through the spring bulb display and wants to give something on the way out. A family wants to dedicate a bench or a tree to a grandparent. A plant sale weekend brings in people who have never bought admission. A seasonal light show sells out, and some of those buyers would add a gift if anyone asked at the right moment.
If your garden runs on Blackbaud Altru and plans to stay on it, the real question isn’t which donation platform to switch to. It’s how to collect those gifts in more places without creating a second database your development team has to reconcile every month.
What a garden actually needs from donation tools
Before comparing products, list the moments when someone might give. For most botanical gardens that list includes:
- General and seasonal appeals sent by email or mail, with a link to an online giving page.
- Gifts added to a ticket or membership purchase, especially for timed events and holiday programs.
- Tribute and memorial gifts, including dedications tied to benches, trees, or garden beds.
- Restricted gifts to a specific collection, conservation program, or capital project.
- On-site giving from visitors who are moved by what they just saw and are holding a phone.
- Pledge payments and larger gifts that development staff arrange one-on-one.
Each of these has to end up in Altru as revenue on the right constituent record, with the right designation and, where relevant, tribute information. If a tool can take the payment but leaves your staff re-keying the gift into Altru, it has moved work around rather than reduced it.
Questions to ask any vendor
Where does the gift land, and how?
Ask exactly how a gift reaches Altru. Does it post automatically, or does someone import a file? Does it match to an existing constituent, or create a new record every time? Gardens with heavy walk-up traffic often have plenty of near-duplicate records already, and a donation tool that adds more makes acknowledgments and donor history harder to trust.
Can donors choose a designation?
If you raise restricted money for specific collections or programs, the giving page should let donors pick from designations that map to what you already use in Altru. Check how the vendor handles a designation you add next year, and who has to update the mapping.
How are tributes handled?
Dedications matter more at gardens than at many other organizations. Find out whether the tool captures honoree and notification details in a form Altru can store, or whether staff will need to add them by hand afterward. If you’re unsure how Altru itself should hold this information for your reporting, settle that internally first, then test in a sandbox before going live.
Does it work on a phone?
A lot of garden giving is impulsive and happens outdoors. A form that needs pinching and zooming loses people. Wallet payments like Apple Pay and Google Pay remove most of the typing, which matters when someone is standing on a path with a stroller.
Can the gift ride along with a purchase?
For event-heavy gardens, the easiest gift to ask for is the one added during checkout for tickets or a membership. Ask whether the tool can include a donation in the same transaction, and how that combined transaction is split into ticket revenue and gift revenue in Altru.
Who absorbs processing fees?
Many donors are happy to cover the card fee if offered. It’s a small thing per gift but adds up over a year of appeals.
Don’t skip the back office
Whatever you choose, the work after the gift still determines whether donors come back. Decide in advance:
- Acknowledgment timing. Who sends the thank-you, from which system, and within how many days.
- Reconciliation. How online gifts tie out to your deposits and Altru batches each month, and who signs off.
- Reporting. Build Altru queries for online gifts by designation and by source, so you can see whether the bulb-season appeal or the holiday event checkout actually raised more.
- Duplicate cleanup. Schedule a regular review of new constituents created by online giving, before they pile up.
None of these depend on a particular vendor, and gardens that settle them early get far more out of any donation tool.
Quick answers
Do we have to leave Altru to get better online giving?
No. Altru can stay where your donor and revenue data lives. The decision is whether its native web forms meet your needs or whether you add a front end that posts back to it.
Should donation and ticket checkout be the same experience?
For most gardens, yes. Visitors don’t think of a gift and an event ticket as separate errands, and asking once in the same cart is simpler for them.
Where Social Good fits
Social Good builds tools that work alongside Altru rather than replacing it. Its Checkouts product gives gardens a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for donations, tickets, and memberships, with Apple Pay and Google Pay, and the data writes back to Altru. Donors can also choose to cover the credit card fee at checkout.
