A parent calls in June. Their daughter is registered for Week 3 of nature camp, but the family vacation moved, so now she needs Week 5. Also, her allergy changed, and could you fix the spelling of her last name while you’re at it? That’s three different kinds of “edit.” In Altru, each one goes down a different path, and that’s why camp season can feel harder than it needs to.
Before you touch anything, work out which of these changes you’re making. The right approach depends almost entirely on that.
First, know how your camp is built
Organizations set up camps in Altru in different ways. Some build each session as an event with registration. Others sell sessions as programs through advance sales, or take sign-ups through web forms tied to one of those. Some do a mix: a public web form for most families, and the desk for scholarship or sibling registrations.
That setup choice decides where a registration lives and what can be changed after the sale. If you inherited the camp configuration from a predecessor, open one existing registration and trace it. Note which record it hangs off (an event, a program sale, an order) and how it connects to the revenue. Ten minutes of tracing saves a lot of guessing later.
Changes that don’t touch money
These are the easy ones. They usually mean updating a person, not a sale.
- Camper name, birthdate, or contact details. Fix these on the constituent record. If the child was entered as a new constituent during checkout, check for a duplicate first. Camp season is a reliable source of duplicate children and parents, especially when one parent registers online and the other calls in.
- Allergies, medical notes, pickup authorizations, T-shirt size. Where this lives depends on how you collect it. It might be registration options or answers on the event, attributes on the constituent, or a note. Edit it wherever your camp roster and staff reports actually read it from. If you update the constituent but your roster pulls from the registration, the counselor never sees the change.
- Swapping which household member is the registrant. If a parent was recorded as the attendee instead of the child, that’s usually more than a quick field edit. Treat it like a session change (below), because capacity and rosters count the registrant.
Changes that move a camper between sessions
Switching weeks is the change that causes the most trouble. Whether Altru lets you edit a registration in place to point at a different session, or requires you to cancel one and create another, depends on your setup and version. I’m not going to guess at the exact screens. Test it in a sandbox or on a dummy registration, or ask Blackbaud support how they recommend transferring a registrant for your configuration.
Either way, check these before you call it done:
- Capacity. Confirm the new session actually has a spot. Then confirm the old session’s count went down, so it opens up for the waitlist.
- Price difference. If the weeks cost the same, you may not need to touch revenue at all. If they don’t (a half-day week, a specialty week, member vs. nonmember pricing), the difference needs to be collected or refunded through Altru’s normal payment and refund process, not hand-noted.
- Revenue and batches. A cancel-and-rebook can create a refund and a new payment on different days. Make sure your finance team knows to expect that pattern in camp season so it doesn’t look like an error during reconciliation.
- Rosters and emails. Rerun the roster for both weeks. If confirmation or reminder emails go out based on a query, confirm the camper drops out of the old week’s list and shows up in the new one.
Cancellations and partial refunds
Write your camp refund policy down before registration opens, and give staff the exact steps for each case: full refund, refund minus a deposit, credit toward another session, no refund. Credits are the tricky one. If you offer them, decide how you’ll track them (a note, an attribute, a gift certificate or similar if your setup supports it) so the next staff member can find and honor it.
Whatever the method, the refund should go through Altru so the revenue record stays accurate. A refund issued directly in the payment processor and never recorded in Altru will show up later as a mismatch nobody can explain.
Make edits less frequent
You can’t stop every change, but you can cut down on the avoidable ones:
- Ask for the camper’s information, not just the purchaser’s, on the form itself. Many name and age fixes come from parents entering their own details.
- Show session dates and age ranges plainly on the registration page, so families pick the right week the first time.
- Set a change deadline (for example, one week before the session starts) and say so in the confirmation email.
- Keep one staff member as the owner of camp edits during peak registration. Changes made the same way every time are much easier to audit.
Quick answers
Can I just change the date on the existing registration?
Sometimes, depending on how the camp is built. Test it on a dummy registration first and check that capacity, revenue, and rosters all follow the change. If any of them don’t, use a cancel-and-rebook instead.
A parent registered two kids but entered both under one name. What now?
Create or find the second child’s constituent record, correct the second registration to point to that child, and add both children to the parent’s household. Then check the roster count.
How do I find all the changes made this season?
Build a query on your camp registrations showing cancellations and new registrations by date. Compare it against the roster. Notes on each changed record make this audit much faster.
