The lecture speaker’s flight is delayed and the start time needs to move by an hour. Or the garden tour is now meeting at the north gate. Either way, you need to reach every person registered for that one event, today, and you want to do it from the data you already have in Altru.
Altru does not give you a single “email everyone on this event” button sitting on the event itself. What it does give you is the registration data, a query engine that can find it, and ways to get that list in front of an email tool. The work is in building the list correctly, because a registrant list is messier than it looks.
Step one: find the registrants with a query
Every registration for a pre-registered event or program lives in your sales data: an order, the constituent who placed it, and the specific event date and time they bought. That means the reliable route is a query, not a report you scroll through and copy from.
Build it around the sales or ticket data for the event, filtered to:
- The specific program or event and the exact date and time you need to reach (a recurring program has many occurrences, and you only want the one that is changing).
- Orders that are still active, so refunded or exchanged registrations drop out.
Then add output fields from the constituent who placed the order: name, primary email address, and the constituent lookup ID. Include the quantity purchased as well. It helps you sanity-check the list against your capacity numbers.
The exact query view names and field paths vary depending on how your organization sells events (advance sales, the online store, group sales), so if you are not sure which view holds your registrations, run a small test against an event you know the headcount for. If the row count does not match, you are in the wrong view or missing a sales channel.
Step two: clean the list before you send
A raw registrant list almost always needs some cleanup. Check for these before anything goes out:
- One buyer, several attendees. A parent who registers three kids appears once as the purchaser. That is usually who you want to email, but if attendees need their own messages, you need attendee-level data, and your registration process has to have collected it.
- Walk-up or phone registrants with no email. Pull a second version of the query showing registrants with a blank email field. Those people need a phone call, and it is better to know who they are now than after the event.
- Duplicate constituents. The same person can exist as two records with two emails, especially if they bought once online and once at the desk. They will get the message twice, or miss it if one address is stale.
- Group sales. A school or tour group order typically has one contact. Decide whether that contact is responsible for passing the news along, and say so in the email.
- Communication preferences. A schedule change for something someone paid for is an operational message, not a marketing one, and most organizations treat it differently. Know your own policy on solicit codes and opt-outs, and do not quietly reuse this list for promotions later.
Step three: get the list into an email tool
You have two realistic paths.
Use Altru’s own communications tools
Saved as a selection, your query can feed Altru’s marketing and communications features, if your organization has email set up through Altru. This keeps the send tied to the constituent records. How much formatting and tracking you get depends on your configuration, so if you have never sent from Altru before, try a test send to staff first rather than learning on a live cancellation.
Export to your email platform
Export the query results and import them into whatever you normally use for email. This is fast and familiar, but it has costs: the list is a snapshot the moment you export it, anyone who registers or cancels afterward is not on it, and you now have a copy of constituent data outside Altru to clean up. If the send is more than a few hours away, rerun the query right before you send.
Make it repeatable
If you run regular events, do not rebuild this query every time. Save one version with the event and date as prompted or easily edited filters, name it clearly (something like “Event registrants with email, by occurrence”), and put it somewhere the whole team can find it. Pair it with the no-email version so the phone list is always one click away.
It is also worth deciding ahead of time which messages every registrant should get by default: a confirmation, a reminder a day or two before, and a short note afterward. When those are routine, the urgent “start time has changed” email becomes the only one you are writing by hand.
Automating the routine messages
The query-and-send approach works, but it depends on someone remembering to run it. Social Good’s Email Designer sends automated, branded emails, such as eTickets, acknowledgments, and post-visit messages, from Altru queries without manual exports. For organizations with a full event calendar, that means a query like the one above can drive the routine sends, and staff only write by hand when something changes.
Quick answers
Can I email registrants from the event record itself?
Not in the way most people expect. Plan on building a query of the event’s registrations and sending from there. If you think your version or configuration offers something more direct, confirm with Blackbaud support before relying on it in a hurry.
Why are there fewer emails than registrations?
Usually because one purchaser bought several spots, some registrants have no email on file, or some orders were refunded. Compare the quantity total to your headcount to see which.
