A holiday catalog is mostly a web page. The hard part isn’t the design. It’s making sure every item on that page is something Altru can actually sell, record, and fulfill without someone retyping orders in January.
So before anyone opens a design tool, sort your gift ideas by how Altru will treat them. That one step decides what the catalog can include, how people check out, and how much work lands on your staff after each order.
Step 1: Map every gift idea to something Altru already sells
Most cultural organizations end up with some mix of these. Each one belongs to a different part of Altru, and that matters:
- Gift memberships. These live in your membership programs. The question to settle early is who the record belongs to: the buyer, the recipient, or both. Decide how you’ll capture the recipient’s name and address, and whether the membership starts on purchase or on a date the giver picks.
- Tribute or “adopt” gifts. An adopt-an-animal, name-a-plant, or honor-a-loved-one gift is usually a donation to a designation, sometimes with a premium or certificate attached. Set up the designation and any tribute fields before the catalog goes live, so the revenue lands in the right place for your development team.
- Admission gifts. Gifting a future visit can be handled a few ways (open-dated tickets, a specific program, or a pass for a later date). Which approach works best depends on how you’ve set up your programs and advance sales. Test the redemption side at the door before you promise it in print.
- Merchandise. Shop items are where many teams get stuck. If you sell merchandise in Altru at the register, don’t assume the same items can be sold online through your existing web forms. Confirm with Blackbaud support or test in a sandbox. If they can’t, link to your separate online shop rather than forcing it.
- Experiences. Behind-the-scenes tours, private events, and similar items are often sold through group sales or as an event with limited capacity. If quantity is small, decide how you’ll stop selling when it’s gone.
Anything that doesn’t map cleanly to one of these is a sign it should be handled by phone or email, not added to the online catalog.
Step 2: Decide how buyers check out
The catalog page itself can live on your website as a simple grid: photo, short description, price, and a button. The button is the important part. Each one should go to a checkout that records the sale in Altru, either an Altru web form or a checkout that writes back to Altru.
A few things to settle:
- One cart or many? If a buyer wants a gift membership and an adoption, can they buy both in one transaction? If each item goes to a separate form, expect some buyers to complete one purchase and drop off before the second.
- Recipient details. Gift purchases need a second name, an address or email for delivery, and often a gift message. Make sure those fields exist on the form and land somewhere in Altru your staff can find with a query.
- Mobile. Holiday shopping happens on phones. Go through every checkout on a phone yourself before launch.
Step 3: Plan fulfillment before the first order
This is where holiday catalogs usually break down. Orders arrive faster than anyone expected, and nobody owns the follow-up.
- Build one query per gift type that pulls new orders with recipient details and gift messages. Run it on a fixed schedule (daily in December).
- Decide what the recipient receives: a printed card and certificate, an email, a membership card, or a package. Each has a different shipping cutoff.
- Publish a last-order date for physical items and a separate one for digital gifts. Put both on the catalog page.
- Write the acknowledgment for the buyer and the notification for the recipient. Buyers want to know the gift was received and when it will arrive.
- Assign an owner. One person checks the queries and clears the queue each day. Without that, gift memberships sit unprocessed until a recipient calls asking where theirs is.
Step 4: Keep it small and launch early
A catalog with six well-run gifts beats one with twenty half-tested ones. Launch in early November if you can, and before you announce it, do a full test purchase of every item: buy it, run the fulfillment query, and confirm the revenue and constituent records look right. Refund the tests afterward.
When the season ends, look at what sold and how much staff time each item took. Some items earn their place every year. Others just make work.
Where Social Good fits
Most of the above can be handled with Altru and your existing website. If your web forms are the weak spot, Checkouts provides a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets, memberships, and donations, with Apple Pay and Google Pay, and the data writes back to Altru. That can cover the gift membership, tribute donation, and admission items in a holiday catalog.
Quick answers
Do I need a separate e-commerce platform for a holiday catalog?
Not for memberships, donations, or admission, which Altru already handles. Merchandise is the item most likely to need a separate shop, so confirm that before you plan around it.
How do I keep gift memberships from starting the day they’re bought?
That depends on how your membership program handles start dates. Test a gift purchase in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support, then state the start rule clearly on the catalog page.
