“How many people did we reach online last year?” sounds like a simple question until someone asks it of Altru. Altru was built to track people who buy something, register for something, or walk through a gate. A recorded tour on YouTube or a live stream on Facebook doesn’t produce any of that, so the numbers end up scattered across platform dashboards, a staff spreadsheet, and whoever remembers to write things down.
There’s no single correct way to bring virtual participation into Altru. The right approach depends on what kind of virtual program it is and what you actually need the number for. Start with the second question.
Decide what the number is for
Virtual numbers usually get asked for by three different audiences, and they don’t need the same thing:
- Grant reports and board decks want reach: views, unique viewers, live attendees, by program and by quarter.
- Fundraising and membership want people: who watched, so you can thank them, ask them, or invite them to visit.
- Attendance reporting (and any benchmark surveys you submit) want a clean separation between onsite and online, so a viral video doesn’t make it look like you had your best summer ever.
Altru is strong at the second need and can be made to serve the first. The third is where careless setups cause damage, so keep it in mind as you choose.
Match the method to the type of program
Live programs with registration (Zoom classes, webinars, virtual camps)
These are the easiest, because you know who signed up. Treat them like any other program or event in Altru: set them up with registration, free or paid, and let people register through your normal online process. Every participant then lands on a constituent record with a history you can query later.
A few practical habits help:
- Use a clear naming convention, such as a “Virtual” prefix or a dedicated program category, so queries can separate online from onsite without guesswork.
- Decide whether you’re counting registrants or actual attendees. Many people register for free webinars and never show up. If attendance matters, pull the attendee list from your meeting platform afterward and mark attendance in Altru, or record the attended count in a note on the event.
- If a single registration covers a household watching together, say so in your reporting. One registration rarely equals one viewer.
Live streams without registration (Facebook Live, YouTube Live)
Here you get a peak or total viewer count from the platform, and almost never names. You can’t attach those viewers to constituent records, and you shouldn’t try to invent records for them.
Record the aggregate number in a consistent place outside of your admissions data. Some organizations log it on the related event record in Altru as a note or attribute so it lives next to the program; others keep it in a shared spreadsheet keyed to the same program names used in Altru. Either works as long as everyone uses the same one.
Recorded content (YouTube videos, social clips, on-demand lessons)
Recorded content accumulates views for months or years, which makes it a poor fit for transaction-based records. A video posted in April may still be getting views in December. Pick a fixed reporting cutoff (for example, views counted at the end of each quarter) and log the cumulative number per video at that point. Note which metric you used: platforms report views, unique viewers, and watch time differently, and switching between them year to year makes trends meaningless.
This data generally belongs in a tracking sheet or a reporting tool rather than in Altru itself. Altru isn’t designed to hold anonymous engagement counts, and forcing it to usually means distorting something else.
The workaround to think twice about
Some teams record virtual viewers as zero-dollar ticket sales so the number appears in Altru’s sales and attendance reports. It does get the count into the system, but it has real costs:
- It mixes online reach into the same reports you use for onsite admissions, capacity, and staffing.
- Anyone running a standard attendance report later, without knowing the history, will overstate visitation.
- It creates transactions with no person behind them, which can confuse finance and reconciliation.
If you go this route anyway, put the virtual “tickets” in a clearly named, separate program, document the practice somewhere your successor will find it, and confirm how those zero-dollar transactions behave in your revenue and deposit reports first. Test it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before rolling it out; the exact effects depend on how your organization has configured sales and reporting.
Turning viewers into people you can reach
Aggregate numbers satisfy funders, but they don’t build relationships. The most useful change for most organizations is adding a light registration step where it makes sense: a free sign-up to get the stream link, a short form to receive a lesson’s activity sheet, or an email signup in the video description. Each of those turns an anonymous viewer into a constituent record in Altru, with a source code or attribute showing they came from virtual programming.
From there, a query of “virtual-only participants who have never visited or given” becomes a real audience for membership offers and visit invitations. That’s something a view count can never give you.
Make the year-end report easy
Before the next program goes live, agree on three things and write them down:
- Where each kind of number lives: registrants in Altru, live-stream and recorded views in one named spreadsheet or report.
- Which metric counts: registrants versus attendees, views versus unique viewers, and the date you take the snapshot.
- How programs are named: the same program name in Altru, on the platform, and in the spreadsheet, so totals can be combined without matching by hand.
With that in place, “how many people did we reach online?” becomes a query plus a column total instead of a week of digging through old dashboards.
Quick answers
Can Altru pull view counts from YouTube or Facebook automatically?
Not that we’re aware of as a native feature. Treat platform analytics as a separate source and record them on a schedule. If you’re unsure whether something has changed in your version, ask Blackbaud support.
Should virtual participation count toward annual attendance?
Report it alongside attendance, not inside it. Most funders and boards want both numbers, clearly labeled.
