A local business wants to join your corporate membership program. Its office manager has a company card and fifteen minutes before her next meeting. She goes to your website looking for a “Join” button and finds individual and family levels, plus a line that says “For corporate memberships, please contact us.” Two emails and a phone call later, someone on your staff is reading card numbers over the phone and keying the whole thing into Altru by hand.
Corporate memberships are often among the higher-value memberships an organization sells, yet they tend to have the clunkiest buying experience. This article covers why that happens with Altru, what your realistic options are, and how to set things up so a company can pay online and the record still lands correctly.
Why corporate memberships are harder to sell online
An individual or household membership has a simple shape: one person (or household) pays, and that person is the member. A corporate membership has more moving parts:
- The member is an organization, not a person. In Altru that usually means an organization constituent record, not an individual.
- The buyer is a contact at that organization, often someone in HR, marketing, or accounts payable, who may not be the person you want listed as the main relationship.
- The benefits go to other people: employee admission, named cardholders, guest passes, event invitations, recognition in your annual report.
- The paperwork is different. Companies often want an invoice, a receipt made out to the business, or a W-9 before they pay.
Altru’s standard online membership forms are built around the individual or household buyer. Whether your version of the native forms can create or attach to an organization constituent as the primary member is something you should confirm directly rather than assume. Test it in a sandbox, or ask Blackbaud support how organization memberships behave when purchased through a web form. In practice, many organizations find the native route either doesn’t support it or creates an individual record that staff then have to fix.
Your options, from least to most automated
1. Inquiry form, staff process the sale
A simple form collects company name, contact, desired level, and number of employees, and someone follows up. This is where most organizations start. It’s fine for a handful of corporate members a year, but it adds days between interest and payment, and some leads go cold while waiting.
2. Invoice, then collect payment
Staff create the membership in Altru, send an invoice, and record payment when it arrives. This matches how many companies prefer to pay, especially larger ones with accounts payable departments. Keep this path open even if you add online purchase. Some corporate buyers simply won’t pay by card.
3. Use the individual web form anyway
Some organizations list corporate levels on the regular membership form and clean up afterward. It works, but expect to merge or reassign records every time: the company ends up as an individual named after the office manager, and the relationship to the actual business has to be built by hand. If you go this route, write a short checklist for the cleanup so it happens the same way each time.
4. A checkout built for organization buyers
A checkout outside Altru’s native forms can ask the right questions up front (company name, billing contact, level) and then write the transaction back to Altru. This is the only option that removes the manual step entirely, so it’s worth considering once corporate memberships become a real revenue line.
Get the Altru setup right before you take money online
Whichever route you choose, the online sale is only as good as the structure behind it. Before you open a corporate “Join” button, settle these:
- Membership program and levels. Make sure corporate levels live in a program set up for organizations, with benefits and card counts defined per level, so staff aren’t deciding them per sale.
- Record conventions. Decide that the organization is the primary member and the buyer is linked to it as a contact through a relationship. Write it down. This is what keeps your corporate member list clean in queries and reports.
- Duplicate checks. Companies get entered as “ABC Corp,” “ABC Corporation,” and “ABC Corp.” Agree on a naming standard and search before creating new organization records.
- Employee benefit fulfillment. Decide how employees prove eligibility at the door: named cards, a shared code, a company ID, or a set number of passes. Your admissions team needs a clear answer before the first employee walks up.
- Renewals. The person who bought last year may have left the company. Keep a secondary contact on the organization record and send renewal notices to both.
- Receipts. Confirm your acknowledgment shows the business name and, if any portion is tax deductible, the correct deductible amount after benefits. Your finance team should sign off on this wording.
What the online form should ask
Keep it short. Corporate buyers abandon long forms just like everyone else. A workable minimum:
- Company name and address
- Buyer’s name, title, email, and phone
- Membership level
- Name and email for the primary benefits contact, if different from the buyer
- Optional: how the company wants to be listed in recognition materials
Employee cardholder names can usually come later. Collecting them at checkout slows the purchase and often produces incomplete lists anyway. A follow-up email after purchase asking for names tends to work better.
Where Social Good fits
Our Checkouts product is a branded, mobile-friendly checkout that replaces Altru web forms for tickets, memberships, and donations, accepts Apple Pay and Google Pay, and writes the data back to Altru. If corporate memberships are a meaningful part of your program, it’s one way to put them on your website with a real “Join” button instead of a “contact us” line. The setup decisions above still apply either way.
Quick answers
Should we stop invoicing corporate members once online purchase is live?
No. Offer both. Smaller businesses tend to pay by card online; larger ones often need an invoice for their accounts payable process.
Can a company buy multiple levels or add extra employee cards?
That depends on how your levels and benefits are configured in Altru. Many organizations handle extra cards as a separate add-on level or a manual adjustment by staff. Decide the policy before you publish prices.
