Ask five departments at a museum or zoo what’s happening next month and you’ll get five calendars. Education has school programs. Development has the gala and a donor preview. Visitor services has timed admission and a members’ morning. Facilities has a rental in the event hall. Marketing has a spreadsheet trying to keep up with all of them. A “big-picture” calendar is the attempt to see all of that in one place, and Altru gets you part of the way there.
This guide covers what Altru holds on its own, where the gaps usually are, and three realistic ways to build one combined view without creating a second database nobody maintains.
Start by separating two calendars that get mixed up
When people say “events calendar,” they usually mean one of two different things:
- The organization calendar is internal. It includes everything that affects staffing, space, and planning: rentals, board meetings, installs and closures, school groups, member events, fundraising events, and public programs.
- The public events calendar is what visitors see on your website. It’s a filtered subset: things people can attend or buy, with availability and a way to purchase.
Most attempts to build one hybrid calendar fail because they try to make a single view serve both audiences. Staff need to see the private rental that closes the courtyard; the public needs to see that the Saturday family program has six spots left. Plan for one source of truth that feeds two views, not one view that does everything.
What Altru already knows
A lot of your calendar data is already in Altru, just in different areas:
- Scheduled programs and their events (timed admission, tours, classes, camps) with dates, times, locations, and capacity.
- Fundraising and special events managed in the events area, with registrations and revenue tied to constituent records.
- Group sales reservations that carry dates, group sizes, and itineraries.
- Memberships, which matter if you run member-only hours or previews tied to specific programs.
Altru has schedule and calendar-style views within individual areas, but in our experience those views are organized around the area you’re working in rather than giving one org-wide picture across programs, special events, and group reservations together. Altru’s interface changes over time, so check this against your own database: open a test month in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support whether a combined view exists for your version before you build something parallel.
What Altru generally does not hold: room setups for internal meetings, exhibit installs, maintenance closures, staff training, or anything that never involves a ticket, registration, or constituent. Those items have to live somewhere else, and that’s fine.
Three ways to build the combined view
1. Queries plus a shared calendar
Build one ad-hoc query per source: program events with date, start time, end time, location, and capacity; special events with date and location; group reservations with arrival date and group size. Export them on a set schedule and bring them into a shared spreadsheet or calendar tool that also holds the non-Altru items.
This is cheap and flexible. The weakness is freshness: the combined view is only as current as the last export, so name an owner and a schedule (weekly is common) and stamp the sheet with the date it was last refreshed.
2. A shared calendar as the planning layer, Altru for anything sold
Some teams flip it. Every event is proposed and approved on a shared staff calendar first (Google, Outlook, or a room-booking tool). Once something is confirmed and will be sold or registered, it gets built in Altru, and the calendar entry gets a short note such as “in Altru” so everyone knows it’s live.
This works well for planning because it catches conflicts before anything is on sale. The tradeoff is double entry for ticketed items, so keep the calendar entry minimal (title, time, space, owner) and let Altru carry pricing and capacity.
3. Reports for the leadership snapshot
For a monthly leadership meeting, a report or query export grouped by week and location is often all anyone wants. It won’t show internal meetings, but it answers “what are we selling and how full is it” straight from Altru with no extra tool.
Conventions that keep any version usable
- Standardize location names in Altru and in your shared calendar so the same room isn’t called three things. Conflicts are invisible when names don’t match.
- Use a consistent naming prefix or category for program types (Education, Members, Rentals, Fundraising) so you can filter and color-code.
- Record status: tentative, confirmed, on sale, canceled. A canceled event that still shows on the big calendar is how double bookings happen.
- Assign one calendar owner. Without one, every department assumes someone else updated it.
- Don’t put private details on the shared view. Donor names on a cultivation event or rental client details belong in Altru, not on a calendar the whole staff can see.
The public side
Once the internal picture is under control, the website calendar is the easier half because everything on it should already be in Altru. Whatever you publish there should pull from Altru directly, not from the planning spreadsheet, so visitors never see an event that sold out an hour ago.
That public piece is what our Calendar Builder handles: an embeddable calendar for your website that shows timed-ticketing availability in real time from Altru. It doesn’t replace the internal planning calendar, but it removes one manually maintained list from the pile.
Quick answers
Can we keep internal meetings in Altru just to have everything in one place?
You could create placeholder programs, but it clutters sales reporting and risks something unsellable appearing online. Most teams keep non-revenue items outside Altru.
How often should the combined calendar refresh?
Match it to how far ahead you plan. Weekly works for most organizations; refresh daily during heavy seasons or around large events.
