Altru’s built-in notices for online orders do one job: they tell someone that a web transaction happened. What they don’t do well is tell the right person the right details. The membership manager wants to know a new Family-level member just joined. Group sales wants to know a school booked. Finance mostly wants nothing in the inbox at all. One generic alert going to one address rarely serves all three.
Below is how to think about what you can change, what you probably can’t, and how to build a notification setup that actually matches how your staff work.
Start by separating three different needs
“Customize the alert” usually means one of three things, and each has a different answer:
- Who receives it. Routing notices to more than one person, or to different people depending on what was sold.
- What it says. Showing the membership level, ticket date, add-ons, or donor note instead of a bare “an order was placed.”
- When it fires. Alerting only on certain sales (new memberships, large gifts, group bookings) instead of every transaction.
Write down which of these your team actually needs before changing anything. In our experience, “we need to edit the email” often turns out to be a routing or filtering problem.
What to check in Altru first
Open the settings for each web form you use for tickets, memberships, and donations, and look at what notification options exist there. Note which recipient fields you can fill in and whether the content of the notice is editable or fixed. Options can differ by form type and by how your system is configured, so check your own forms rather than relying on a colleague’s screenshots.
If you can’t tell whether a setting exists, or what it controls, test it: run a low-dollar transaction through the form in a sandbox or with a staff test record, and see what arrives and where. Blackbaud support can also confirm what’s configurable on your version. Confirm rather than assume; it’s better to know up front what the built-in notice can and can’t include.
Fixing recipients without touching Altru
If Altru only lets you enter one address, make that address a distribution list or shared mailbox in your email system (for example, websales@yourorg.org). Then:
- Add or remove staff from the list in your email admin, not in Altru. Seasonal changes stop requiring an Altru login.
- Use mail rules to sort notices by keywords in the subject or body, such as a membership level name or the form name, so membership notices go to the membership team and the rest go to a general folder.
- Keep the list owned by a role, not a person. When someone leaves, alerts don’t quietly stop.
This is low-tech, but it solves the “other users need these alerts too” problem in an afternoon.
Getting the details you actually need
If the notice itself can’t carry the fields you want, stop expecting it to. Treat the alert as a nudge and use a query as the source of truth.
Build a revenue or membership query limited to online transactions from the last day or two (filter on whatever field your setup uses to identify web sales, and spot-check the results against a known online order), with the columns your staff care about: constituent name, membership program and level, new versus renewal, expiration date, ticket program and date, amount, and any comments field your form collects. Save it in a shared folder and have the responsible staff member run it each morning.
For membership sales specifically, a useful variant shows only new joins and upgrades. Those are the transactions that usually need a human follow-up (welcome packet, card, a thank-you call for higher levels), and they get buried when they arrive mixed in with every general admission ticket.
Limiting alerts to the sales that matter
If your goal is to hear about only certain transactions, the query approach handles that better than any per-order email. Add criteria for amount thresholds, specific membership levels, or group sales, and the noise disappears. If you need those filtered results pushed to people rather than pulled, check whether your Altru setup supports scheduled or emailed query output; if it doesn’t, that’s the gap a reporting or email tool has to fill.
A setup that tends to hold up
- One shared mailbox receives all built-in online sales notices.
- Mail rules split membership, donation, and ticket notices into folders.
- A saved “yesterday’s web sales” query is the daily reference for details.
- A separate “new members and upgrades” query drives welcome follow-up.
- A short written note explains where each piece lives, so the next hire inherits it.
When you need more than a nudge
Our Email Designer sends automated, branded emails from Altru queries without manual exports. It’s built for messages like eTickets, acknowledgments, and renewal notices. If the saved queries above already identify the sales that need attention, such as new members, those same queries can drive automated follow-up emails instead of a staff member working the list by hand.
Quick answers
Can different staff get alerts for different kinds of online sales?
Possibly per web form, depending on your configuration. The dependable route is a shared mailbox plus mail rules, which works regardless of what Altru allows.
Can I add membership level or ticket date to the alert?
Check your form settings and test it. If the content is fixed, a saved query filtered to web transactions gives you those fields reliably.
