A school group has the 10:00 planetarium show booked out. A private rental takes over the garden pavilion on Saturday night. Facilities scheduled a staff walkthrough as a program so it would hold the space. None of these belong on the calendar the public sees, yet all of them live in Altru alongside the shows and tours you do want people to buy.
Hiding them isn’t hard once you know which calendar you mean and what’s putting each item there. Altru has no single “hide this” checkbox that applies everywhere. Each place an event can show up has its own control.
First, pin down which calendar
“The Altru calendar” can mean three different things, and the fix is different for each:
- The staff-facing calendar in daily sales or advance sales, where cashiers pick a program time to sell.
- The online sales calendar that buyers see through your Altru web forms.
- A calendar on your own website, whether it’s hand-built, pulled from a feed, or provided by a third-party tool.
Before changing anything, open the event that shouldn’t be showing and note which of these three it appears on. Most “it’s still showing” frustrations come from fixing the right setting on the wrong calendar.
Hiding events from online buyers
The online calendar generally shows what’s been made available for web sales. So the question to ask about any unwanted item is: why is this marked as sellable online?
- Check the program’s sales methods. Programs and events in Altru can be limited to particular sales methods. If something should only be sold at the desk or through group sales, remove online as a sales method for that program. This is the cleanest fix for anything that’s permanently internal, like staff-only sessions or group-only programs.
- Check what the web form is configured to include. Your online sales form is set up to offer certain programs or events. If a program was added to the form when it was created and nobody revisited it, it will keep appearing. Review the list the form draws from and take off anything that shouldn’t be there.
- Deal with one-off times separately. For a single occurrence, such as one evening closed for a rental, you usually don’t want to change the whole program. Look at whether that specific scheduled time can be removed or cancelled, or whether its availability for online sales can be limited on its own. What’s possible depends on how the program is set up, so test the change on a sandbox or a low-stakes future date first and confirm the time actually disappears from the public form.
- Recheck in a private browser window. Browsers hold onto old pages, and some web form changes may not show right away. Look again in a private window before deciding the change didn’t take.
If you can’t find a way to hide a single occurrence without affecting the rest of the program, that’s worth a direct question to Blackbaud support with the program name and date in hand. It’s better to get a definitive answer than to experiment on live inventory.
Hiding events from staff at the desk
This one is less about visibility and more about clutter and mistakes. If cashiers keep seeing internal holds or expired programs, look at:
- Old or inactive programs that should be marked inactive instead of left on the schedule.
- Placeholder times created to block a space. If your team uses programs to reserve rooms, consider a naming convention (for example, starting the name with “HOLD”) so staff can tell at a glance not to sell it, and limit its sales methods so it can’t be sold by accident.
- Who can see what. Depending on your security setup, different roles may see different options. If one cashier sees something another doesn’t, compare their roles before changing the program.
Hiding events on your own website
If your website shows a calendar that pulls from Altru, it will only be as selective as its source. A hand-maintained page means someone has to remember to take things off. A feed-based calendar typically mirrors whatever is available online in Altru, so fixing the online settings above usually fixes the website too. If your web calendar shows things that Altru’s own web form correctly hides, the problem is in the website tool, not Altru, and that’s where to look.
A short checklist for common cases
- Private rental or buyout: remove or cancel the affected public times for that date only, rather than changing the whole program.
- School or group-only program: drop online from its sales methods; sell it through group sales.
- Member-only preview: decide whether it should be hidden or just restricted. Hiding it means members can’t book online either.
- Staff training or room hold: clear naming, no online sales method, and ideally not a public-facing program at all.
- Sold out: usually leave it visible. A sold-out time tells people to pick another one; a missing time makes them call you.
Video walkthrough
This short video covers keeping selected events off your public calendar.
Where Calendar Builder fits
Social Good’s Calendar Builder creates embeddable timed-ticketing calendars for your website with real-time availability from Altru, so what buyers see reflects your current Altru inventory rather than a page someone has to update by hand. If you’re weighing it for a specific hide-or-show scenario, ask us to walk through your setup before you decide.
