A family buys four timed tickets for Saturday at 11:00. Friday night the forecast turns to thunderstorms, or a kid gets sick, and they want Sunday instead. They look for a “change my date” link in their confirmation email, don’t find one, and either call you, email you, or simply don’t show up.
The short version: as far as we know, Altru does not give online buyers a self-service way to move their own tickets to a different date or time. Rescheduling is a staff task. You can’t make Altru do something it doesn’t do, but you can make the staff process fast, predictable, and close enough to self-service that most visitors won’t mind. Here’s how we’d set it up.
What Altru handles, and what it doesn’t
Altru’s online sales run through its web forms, and those forms are built for buying, not for managing an order afterward. Once the purchase is complete, the order lives in Altru as a sale tied to a constituent record, and changes to it happen inside the application by staff with the right permissions.
Staff can typically adjust or exchange tickets on an existing order, but the exact options depend on your version, your security roles, and how your programs and events are configured. Before you write a policy around it, test the real workflow in a sandbox or on a low-stakes test order: buy a ticket online, then have a front-desk or box-office user try to move it to another time slot. Note what happens to payment, revenue, and capacity on both the old and new slots. If anything is unclear, Blackbaud support can confirm what your environment allows.
That test matters more than any documentation, because it tells you exactly how many clicks a reschedule costs your team, which in turn tells you how generous your policy can afford to be.
Turn the staff task into a request, not a phone call
The pain usually isn’t the reschedule itself. It’s the back-and-forth: voicemail, finding the order, asking which time they want, checking availability, calling back. A simple intake step removes most of that.
- Create a short reschedule request form. Any form tool works. Ask for the buyer’s name, the email used at purchase, the original date and time, and two preferred alternates. Two alternates means you rarely need a follow-up conversation when the first choice is full.
- Put the link where people already look. Add it to the order confirmation and eTicket emails, your visit-planning page, and your FAQ. Altru’s confirmation content is editable, so a single sentence like “Need a different day? Request a change here” goes a long way.
- Route requests to one shared inbox. Not a person. Whoever is on the box-office shift works the queue.
- Set a response promise you can keep. “We’ll confirm within one business day” is better than an implied instant answer you’ll miss on weekends.
- Reply with the updated tickets. After the change is made in Altru, send the new confirmation or eTickets so the guest has something scannable for the new date.
Write the policy before the first request arrives
Self-service tools enforce rules automatically. A staff process needs those rules written down, or each person on the desk will invent their own. Decide:
- Cutoff: how close to the visit a change is still allowed (for example, up to the start of the original time slot, or 24 hours before).
- Number of changes: one free change per order is common and easy to explain.
- Price differences: what happens if the new date is priced higher, or lower, than the original. Many organizations simply honor the original price for a same-category swap.
- Special events and programs: whether limited-capacity events follow the same rules as general admission. Often they shouldn’t.
- Weather and closures: if you close for weather, you’ll get a wave of requests at once. Decide in advance whether you’ll move everyone proactively or let them choose.
Publish the policy in plain words on your tickets page and in the confirmation email. Clear rules cut requests on their own, because people stop asking about things the page already answers.
Reduce how often people need to reschedule
Some of the demand for rescheduling comes from how tickets are sold in the first place. A few options worth weighing:
- Not every ticket needs a time slot. If capacity is only tight on certain days or for certain experiences, general admission tickets valid for a date range (or any day) remove the problem entirely for most visitors. Check how your Altru setup supports this before promising it.
- Show availability honestly. When buyers can see which times are filling up, they pick a slot they can actually make instead of grabbing whatever is listed first.
- Send a reminder a day or two out. A pre-visit email with the date, time, parking, and the reschedule link catches conflicts while there’s still time to fix them, instead of turning into a no-show.
Keep an eye on the numbers
Once the process is live, build a simple Altru query or keep a tally from the request inbox: how many reschedules per week, how far in advance they come in, and which dates people are moving away from. If most changes are weather-driven, a clearer weather policy may help more than anything else. If they cluster around one popular slot, you may need more capacity there. And if volume stays high, that’s real data to bring to your leadership when you weigh process changes or additional tools.
Quick answers
Can buyers change their own ticket date through an Altru web form?
Not that we’re aware of. Online forms handle new purchases; changes to an existing order are made by staff in Altru. Confirm in your own environment, since configurations vary.
Is refunding and having the guest rebuy a reasonable shortcut?
It works, but it creates extra transactions, processing fees, and reporting noise. If your staff can exchange tickets on the existing order, that’s usually cleaner. Test both and compare what they do to your revenue reports.
