A board member’s spouse wants to attend the gala at the staff rate. A school group asks for a teacher discount on a summer workshop. Members expect to pay less for the lecture series. Each of these is a discount on a registration fee, and each one tends to land on someone’s desk with the question “how do I actually do that in Altru?”
The short version: there isn’t a single discount button that works the same way for every kind of registration. What you can do depends on whether you’re registering people for a special event, selling a program through daily or advance sales, or taking registrations through a web form. A few setup decisions cover most cases and keep your revenue reporting honest.
First, decide what the discount really is
Before touching any configuration, sort the discount into one of these buckets. The right Altru approach follows from it.
- A standing price for a known group. Members, staff, teachers, seniors. The discount is predictable and applies every time.
- A one-off concession. A director approves a reduced fee for one person, or you’re smoothing over a complaint.
- A promotion. Early-bird pricing, a code in an email campaign, a partner offer with an end date.
- A full comp. The person attends free, but you still want them counted as a registrant.
Mixing these up is where most of the reporting mess comes from. A standing member rate handled as a string of one-off price overrides, for example, leaves you unable to answer “how many members came to the lecture series?” without reading every transaction.
Standing rates: build them as their own registration options
For predictable discounts, the cleanest approach in Altru is to set up a separate registration option (or price) for each audience rather than discounting the standard fee at checkout. A gala might have a general admission option, a member option, and a staff option, each at its own price.
This has a few practical advantages:
- Staff don’t have to remember or calculate the discount. They pick the right option.
- Reports and queries can count registrants by option, so you can see who used each rate.
- Revenue posts at the actual amount paid, with no adjustment to reconcile later.
The tradeoff is enforcement. A separate member option doesn’t by itself stop a non-member from choosing it, especially online. Decide whether staff verify membership at registration, at check-in, or not at all, and write that down. If you sell these registrations through web forms, test what a non-member sees before you publish.
Promotions and codes
Altru has discount and promotion tools in its sales areas, and many organizations use them for admission and programs. Whether those same discount tools apply cleanly to your particular registration type, and to the specific web form you use for it, is something to confirm rather than assume. Behavior can differ between special event registrations, programs sold through advance sales, and online forms.
The safest way to find out:
- Set up the discount or promotion in your sandbox (or on a low-stakes test event if you don’t have one).
- Run a registration through each channel you actually use: front desk, phone, and online.
- Check that the discounted amount shows correctly on the transaction, in the batch, and on the constituent record.
- Run your usual event or revenue report and confirm the discount appears the way your finance team expects.
If a discount works at the desk but not on the web form, or vice versa, ask Blackbaud support whether that’s expected for your configuration before building a workaround around it.
For time-limited promotions like early-bird pricing, a second registration option with a clear name and a planned end date is often simpler than a code. Just put the date you’ll retire it on someone’s calendar, because nothing will remind you.
One-off concessions
When someone needs a reduced fee once, staff will usually override the price on the transaction. That’s fine occasionally, but set some guardrails:
- Limit who can change prices. Your security roles control this, so review which front-desk roles can edit amounts.
- Require a short note on the transaction or constituent record saying who approved it and why.
- Build a simple query that lists registrations where the amount paid is lower than the standard fee for that option. Review it monthly. If the same reason keeps showing up, it’s probably a standing rate that deserves its own option.
Full comps
For free registrations, create a complimentary option at zero dollars instead of discounting a paid option to nothing. You’ll get a clean count of comped attendees, and nobody has to explain a string of 100% overrides to the auditor. If the comp has a fair market value your finance team tracks (common with galas), agree on how that’s recorded before the event, not after.
Discounts and fundraising events
Gala and benefit registrations often split a fee into a benefit portion and a tax-deductible portion. A discount changes that math. If a member pays less for a gala seat, does the discount come out of the deductible amount, the benefit value, or both? Settle that with your finance office, then check that the receipt or acknowledgment for a discounted registration shows the right deductible amount. This is one place where testing a single discounted transaction end to end is worth the ten minutes.
A setup checklist
- List every discount you offered on registrations last year and sort each into standing, one-off, promotion, or comp.
- Create registration options for the standing rates and comps.
- Test any promotional discounts in each sales channel before relying on them.
- Tighten price-override permissions and require notes.
- Add a monthly review query for registrations below standard price.
- Confirm with finance how discounts affect deductible amounts on benefit events.
None of this needs anything beyond Altru itself. It mostly comes down to deciding up front what kind of discount you’re offering and setting it up to match, so your reports reflect what actually happened.
