A caller books four tickets for Saturday’s 11:00 entry. Your phone agent takes the card, completes the order in Advance Sales, and then has to answer one question: “How do I get my tickets?” If the answer is “pick them up at will call,” you’ve just added someone to the will-call line on their visit day. The same thing happens at the admissions window when a guest buys for a later date and asks for the tickets on their phone instead of on paper.
Online orders usually come with an email confirmation. Tickets sold by staff in Daily Sales or Advance Sales often don’t, and that gap is what this article is about: what to confirm in your own Altru setup, a workable process for getting tickets into guests’ inboxes, and what to watch for at the gate.
Start by confirming what your Altru setup does today
Altru’s ticket delivery options for staff-entered sales are not the same as its web sales flow, and what’s available can depend on your configuration and on changes Blackbaud has shipped over time. Rather than assume, check three things:
- Whether staff-side sales can trigger any email at all. Process a test order in Daily Sales and one in Advance Sales against a test constituent with your own email address. See what arrives, if anything.
- What the printed ticket contains. Note the barcode and the fields printed on it. Whatever you email later should carry the same scannable barcode, or your gate staff will be scanning something your scanners don’t recognize.
- Where the email address is stored. For advance orders tied to a constituent, it’s on the constituent record. For walk-up Daily Sales, there may be no constituent at all, which means there’s nowhere to send anything.
If you aren’t sure whether a native option exists for your version, test it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support directly. It’s a five-minute question that can save you building a workaround you don’t need.
The real prerequisite: an email address on the order
Whatever sending method you end up using, it fails without a good email address attached to the sale. This is a staff habit problem more than a software problem.
For phone and advance orders
Search for the caller’s constituent record before creating a new one, then read the email address back to them letter by letter. A mistyped address is an easy way for an emailed ticket to “never arrive.” Creating a fresh record for every call also leaves you with duplicates, which makes later lookups and marketing lists messier.
For walk-up Daily Sales
Decide when you’ll bother. Most guests buying same-day admission walk straight in and don’t need an email. The cases worth capturing an address for are future-dated tickets, group leaders buying for others, and anyone who asks. Give cashiers that short list so they aren’t asking every guest.
A process that works without native emailing
If testing shows that staff-entered sales don’t send tickets on their own, the most reliable pattern is to let Altru hold the data and send the email from outside the sale itself.
- Build a query of ticket orders that need delivery. Include the constituent’s email address, the event or program name, date and time, quantity, and the ticket barcode or order identifier your scanners read. Limit it to orders created since the last send. Check which fields your query sources actually expose: if you can’t separate staff-entered orders from online ones, or the barcode value isn’t available, sort that out before going further (Blackbaud support can tell you what’s queryable).
- Exclude what you don’t want to email. Leave out orders with no email address, orders already picked up or printed if you track that, and refunded or voided transactions.
- Decide on frequency. For advance orders, a few times a day is usually fine. For guests buying at the window for a later time slot the same day, a manual send right after the sale may be needed, so have a fallback (print it) for those.
- Send a clear, branded message. Include the date, entry time, number of tickets, the barcode, parking or entrance directions, and a phone number to call if something’s wrong.
- Record that it went out. An attribute, note, or log of sent order numbers prevents duplicate sends and gives the front desk something to check when a guest says they never got it.
Teams sometimes run steps 1 through 4 by exporting the query to a spreadsheet and doing a mail merge. That works at low volume, but it depends on one person remembering to do it, and it breaks down quickly around holidays and school groups.
Check the gate side before you launch
Emailing a ticket is only useful if it scans. Before you tell staff to start offering emailed tickets:
- Scan a test email from a phone screen at full brightness, and again at the dimmest setting guests tend to use.
- Confirm the barcode in the email matches the one on the printed ticket for the same order.
- Make sure the ticket can’t be redeemed twice if a guest has both a printout and an email.
- Tell gate staff what an emailed ticket looks like, so they don’t wave it off as a receipt.
Quick answers
Can I email tickets for a walk-up sale with no constituent?
Not without an email address somewhere on the order. If you want to offer it, attach the sale to a constituent record, or create a minimal one with a name, an email address, and whatever other fields your organization requires.
Should we stop printing tickets?
Keep printing available. Some guests will always prefer paper, and a printer is your fallback when an email is delayed or lands in spam.
Where Social Good fits
Our Email Designer sends automated, branded emails such as eTickets from Altru queries, so the query-based send described above can run automatically instead of through manual exports. Altru still holds the orders; the emails just go out from the data that’s already there.
