A family membership comes with four guest passes a year. The member wants to bring her sister’s kids on Saturday, and your Saturday tickets are timed and sell out online. She opens your website, picks a time slot, and finds no place to use the guest passes she already paid for. Her choices are to buy full-price tickets or to call you. Neither one feels like a membership benefit.
Redeeming guest passes during an online ticket purchase is one of the harder things to set up around Altru. Before choosing a fix, it helps to be clear about what a “guest pass” means at your organization and what Altru actually tracks.
First, decide what kind of guest pass you have
Organizations use the phrase for at least three different benefits, and each one needs a different online setup:
- A per-visit guest allowance. “Bring one guest every time you visit.” Nothing gets used up, so there is nothing to count. You only need a way to sell a free or discounted guest ticket alongside the member’s own ticket.
- A fixed number of passes per term. “Four guest passes per membership year.” This is the hard one, because something has to keep track of how many the member has used and stop them at zero.
- Physical or printed vouchers. Passes mailed or handed out at join or renewal, each with its own code or barcode. These can work online if every voucher has a unique code that can only be used once.
If your benefit is the first kind, online redemption is mostly a pricing question. The second and third kinds are where most of the work is.
What Altru gives you to work with
Altru lets you define benefits on membership levels, set member pricing for tickets, and use discounts and promotions in daily sales and on web forms. What it doesn’t clearly do, as far as we know, is count a member’s guest pass balance down automatically when they buy tickets through a standard web form. That behavior depends on your version and configuration, so don’t assume either way. Test it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before you promise it to members.
In practice, most organizations that offer limited guest passes online put together a workaround from the tools below.
Workable approaches
1. A guest price type limited to members
Create a “Member Guest” price type at $0 or a reduced price, and offer it only to logged-in or verified members. This works well for per-visit allowances. It doesn’t enforce a yearly limit on its own, so if your benefit is “four per year,” you are relying on the honor system plus an audit later.
2. A unique promo code for each pass
For vouchers or a fixed count, give each pass its own one-time discount code that takes a guest ticket to $0. Members enter the code at checkout, and once it’s used it can’t be used again. This is the closest you can get to real enforcement with standard tools. The costs are setup and upkeep. Someone has to create the codes, connect them to the right member (a constituent attribute or note works), and send them out at join and renewal. Confirm how many codes your discount setup can handle and whether codes can be restricted to single use before you build around this.
3. Hold back a small block of comp inventory
Some sites keep a few complimentary tickets per timed slot and have members request them by email or phone. This doesn’t scale, but it protects capacity on sold-out days and keeps every redemption in front of staff.
Tracking usage when the system won’t count for you
Whatever approach you choose, build a query you can run monthly: guest-priced or guest-discounted tickets by constituent, compared with each member’s allowance for their membership level. That lets you find members who are well over their limit and members who have never used their passes. The second list is useful for renewal messages (“You still have three guest passes before your membership renews”).
Make sure the online sale and any desk redemptions use the same price type or discount. If the front desk keys guest admissions as a manual comp, they won’t appear in the same query, and your counts will be off.
Policy questions to settle first
- Do unused passes expire at renewal or carry over?
- Can a guest pass be used for a timed slot that’s nearly sold out, or only when tickets are available to the public?
- Does the member have to attend with the guest, or can they give a pass away?
- Do guest passes cover special exhibitions or events, or general admission only?
Your answers decide which workaround fits. For example, “the member must attend” goes well with a guest price type sold only with a member ticket. “Passes can be given away” points toward unique codes.
Where Social Good fits
The pricing and code setup above happens in Altru. If you’re also replacing Altru’s standard web forms, Checkouts gives you a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets and memberships, and the sales write back to Altru. Members then use their guest options in the same purchase flow they use for everything else. Test your chosen guest pass approach end to end before launch.
Quick answers
Can members use guest passes on a standard Altru web form?
You can offer guest pricing or discount codes there. Automatically deducting passes from a member’s balance isn’t something we’d count on without testing it in your own environment.
What’s the simplest option that still enforces a limit?
Single-use discount codes, one per pass, linked to the member’s record.
