A visitor buys a $17.42 tote and a magnet in the museum store, and the cashier asks, “Would you like to round up to $18 for the museum?” Plenty of guests will say yes. The amount is small, but it adds up over a season, and it is one of the easiest ways to get gift revenue from guests who would never fill out a donation form.
The hard part is the back office. You want that 58 cents to land in Altru as a donation, not as extra merchandise revenue, and you want it to be quick for a cashier with a line forming. The setup below handles both.
Does Altru have a round-up button?
As far as we know, Altru does not have a built-in “round up to the nearest dollar” option at the point of sale that works out the difference and books it as a gift for you. We would rather say that plainly than guess. If you want to be sure for your version and configuration, test it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before you train staff.
What Altru does handle is adding a donation to a sales order alongside merchandise or admission. That is enough to run a round-up program. The cashier just has to enter the amount.
Setting it up in Altru
1. Create a dedicated designation
Give round-up gifts their own designation (or appeal, depending on how your development team tracks small-dollar giving). Something like “Store Round-Up” makes the program easy to report on later, and it keeps a summer’s worth of 40-cent gifts from cluttering your annual fund numbers.
2. Make the donation easy to add at the register
Configure daily sales so staff can add a donation to that designation quickly and type in any amount. Exactly how you streamline this depends on your Altru configuration, so walk through it in a sandbox with a cashier before go-live. If the cashier has to dig through menus, the ask will quietly stop happening by August.
3. Decide which constituent the gift goes to
Most store purchases are walk-up sales with no named buyer. That’s fine for merchandise, but a donation needs to be attached to someone. You have two realistic options:
- A generic “store guest” constituent for anonymous round-ups. Fast, and honest about what you know.
- The real person, when the buyer is a member or gives a name. Worth it if you want to see who rounds up, but slower at the register.
Most organizations use the generic record by default and attach a real constituent only when a member is already looked up for their discount. Whichever you choose, write it down so every cashier does the same thing.
4. Get the tax order right
Round up on the final total, after sales tax. The guest is rounding what they actually pay. The donation line itself should not be taxed. Check with whoever manages your sales tax setup that the donation item is not picking up tax by default, and run a test sale in a sandbox to confirm the math comes out to a whole dollar.
Cash, cards, and the cashier script
Round-ups work best on card sales, where there is no change to count. With cash, many stores skip the formal round-up and let guests drop change in a donation box. That money goes in through your normal cash donation process, not daily sales.
For cards, keep the script short and the same every time:
- Ring up the merchandise and note the total with tax.
- Ask: “Would you like to round up to [next dollar] for the museum?”
- If yes, add a donation for the difference to the round-up designation.
- Take payment for the new whole-dollar total.
A small sign at the register helps more than you’d think. It means the guest has heard the idea before the cashier asks.
Receipts and acknowledgments
Make sure the printed or emailed receipt shows the donation as its own line, separate from merchandise. For gifts of a dollar or less, most organizations treat that receipt as the acknowledgment and leave these gifts out of their thank-you letter process. Confirm your approach with your finance office or accountant, especially if you sometimes let guests round up by more than a dollar.
Also check that round-up gifts don’t trigger your standard acknowledgment letter or flag the store guest record for donor stewardship. Excluding the round-up designation in the query that drives your acknowledgments is usually the simplest way to handle that.
Reporting on it
Because the gifts sit in one designation, a simple revenue query by date range tells you what the program brought in. Compare month to month and by cashier if your setup records who rang the sale. Big gaps between staff usually mean someone is forgetting to ask, not that their guests are less generous.
What about online sales?
The same idea works for online ticket and membership purchases, but there’s no cashier to ask, so the offer has to be built into the checkout. Social Good’s Upsells feature lets you offer add-ons, including memberships, in the cart of our Altru-connected checkout. It does not calculate a round-up amount, but it gives online buyers an add-on offer at the moment they’re already paying. That’s the online version of the same ask.
