Every spring it happens to someone: the Week 3 nature camp filled weeks ago, the education team knows it’s full, and yet the registration page still lets parents pick it. Or Altru shows zero seats left, but the website still says “Register.” Then a family pays for a spot that doesn’t exist, and someone has to make a very awkward refund call.
Altru doesn’t decide “sold out” by looking at a roster and noticing it looks full. It compares sales recorded against a specific capacity on a specific scheduled item. When a full camp doesn’t show sold out, one of those two numbers isn’t what you think it is. Below are the usual culprits, roughly in the order worth checking.
1. The capacity lives somewhere other than where you’re selling
Camps get built in Altru in a few different ways: as a program with scheduled times, as a series of events with registrations, or as a mix where a parent program has individual weekly sessions underneath. Capacity is enforced on the thing that actually has the capacity value set, usually the individual scheduled session.
Common mismatches:
- Capacity is set on one session, but the web form or sales screen points to a different (or duplicate) session with no limit.
- Capacity was left blank on a newly copied session. Depending on how it was set up, blank can effectively mean unlimited, so it will never show as sold out.
- A multi-week camp was built as one long session with one capacity, while staff think of it as separate weeks.
Check: open the exact session a parent would buy and confirm the capacity number on that record, not on the program or a sibling session.
2. Some of the “full” campers were never sold through Altru
Sold-out status only counts sales Altru knows about against that session. If some registrations came in through a paper form, a spreadsheet, a scholarship list, a staff-kid courtesy spot, or a separate payment tool that was reconciled later as general revenue, those campers fill the room but not the capacity count.
Check: compare your camp roster to the sales or registrants recorded against the session in Altru. If the roster has 24 kids and Altru shows 18 sold, the gap is your answer. Going forward, enter every camper as a real sale or registration against the session, even complimentary ones, using a zero-dollar price type if your setup allows it.
3. Price types or sales channels are counted differently
Camps often have several price types: member, non-member, sibling discount, scholarship. They may also be sold through more than one channel, such as advance sales at the desk, group sales for a school or partner, and the online form. If any of those are allocated or tracked against a different capacity bucket, the total on the session can look like there’s still room even though the combined headcount is full.
Check: look at how capacity is allocated by channel or price type on the session, if your configuration uses allocations at all. If you’re not sure whether Altru is enforcing one shared capacity or separate pools in your setup, test it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before camp registration opens next year.
4. Cancellations, refunds, and holds
The opposite problem shows up too. A camp shows sold out but the roster has openings, or it flips back and forth. Refunds and cancellations may or may not release capacity depending on how they were processed. An abandoned web cart or an in-progress order may hold seats temporarily. Exchanges between weeks can leave one session over-counted and another under-counted if the original sale wasn’t properly reversed.
Check: for any session where the numbers disagree, pull the individual transactions against it and look for refunds processed as payment adjustments rather than true returns, or exchanges that added a new sale without removing the old one.
5. The website is showing something different from Altru
Sometimes Altru is right and the public page is wrong. A camp listing page built by hand on your website will keep saying “Register now” until someone edits it. Web pages and forms can also be cached, so a seat count that changed an hour ago may not be reflected for every visitor. And some setups only check availability at the final step of checkout, so a parent sees the camp as open, fills out a long form, and then gets an error.
Check: open the session in Altru and the public page side by side, in a private browser window. If Altru says zero remaining and the page doesn’t, the problem is the page, not the capacity.
A short pre-season checklist
- Build one session per week (or per age group per week) and set capacity on every one of them before opening registration.
- Run a query of camp sessions with their capacity and sold counts. Any session with a blank capacity gets fixed immediately.
- Decide that every camper, including scholarships and comps, is entered as a sale against the session. No side lists.
- Write down how staff process a week change or a refund so capacity is released correctly.
- Do a test purchase on the last open seat of a sandbox or dummy session and confirm the public page flips to sold out.
- Once registration opens, compare the roster and the Altru count weekly until camp starts.
Where Social Good fits
The fixes above are Altru setup and process; no add-on replaces getting capacity and sales right. If your issue is the public side, where camp pages don’t reflect what Altru knows, Calendar Builder lets you embed a calendar on your website that shows availability from Altru in real time, so a full session looks full without anyone remembering to edit a page.
Quick answers
Does Altru mark a camp sold out automatically?
When capacity is set on the session being sold and every registration is recorded against it, remaining availability drops to zero as sales come in. Whether and how a “sold out” message appears to the public depends on the form or page doing the selling.
Can I add a waitlist when a camp fills?
We’re not aware of a built-in waitlist that works like a ticketing waitlist for every Altru setup. Confirm with Blackbaud support for your configuration; many teams keep a simple interest list and contact families when a spot opens.
