Three school buses on the same Tuesday morning is a scheduling problem. Six is a crowd-control problem. Plenty of museums, zoos, and gardens have a rule like “no more than four school groups per day” or “one camp group per gallery slot,” and they want Altru to enforce it at the moment a group is booked rather than relying on whoever happens to be taking the call.
The short version: Altru is good at capping people on a program or event. It is much less direct about capping the number of groups of a particular type on a given day. Below is how to think about the gap and the setups that get you closest.
What Altru limits well, and what it doesn’t
Capacity in Altru generally lives on the thing being sold: a scheduled program, an event, a time slot. Set a capacity of 120 on a 10:00 guided tour and Altru will stop selling at 120, whether those seats go to individuals, members, or a group reservation.
Group type is different. It describes the reservation (school, camp, senior center, tour operator, scout troop), and it’s useful for reporting, pricing, and follow-up. But as far as we know, there isn’t a native rule that says “allow at most N reservations of group type X per day” and blocks the next one. Behavior can vary with your configuration and Altru release, so confirm with Blackbaud support or test it in a sandbox before you build a process around either answer.
That means the realistic options are to make capacity do the work for you, or to make the limit very visible to the people booking.
Option 1: Give each group type its own program or time slots
The cleanest workaround is structural. Instead of one “Guided Tour” program that every group books into, create a separate program (or separate scheduled times) for the group type you need to control, for example “School Group Tour” at 9:30, 10:00, and 10:30.
Then set capacity in a way that translates into groups:
- One group per slot. If school tours are one class per time, set the slot capacity to your maximum class size. Once a group books it, the slot is effectively full.
- A daily cap by number of slots. Want no more than four school groups a day? Schedule exactly four school-group times. When they’re gone, they’re gone.
- Shared space protection. If school groups and general visitors both use the same gallery, schedule the school slots so they don’t overlap with the times you need to keep open.
The tradeoff is more programs to maintain and a slightly messier sales picture, since a “tour” now shows up under several names. Most organizations decide that’s worth it for the one or two group types that actually cause crowding.
Option 2: Hold back capacity for groups
Sometimes the concern runs the other way: too many groups crowd out walk-up visitors. In that case, keep group bookings in their own program or event and size its capacity to the share of the day you’re willing to give to groups. General admission inventory stays untouched, and group sales can’t eat into it.
If you need to adjust on the fly (a field trip season, a holiday week), changing the capacity on the group-only times is much easier than policing individual bookings.
Option 3: Make the limit a checked step, not a memory test
When structure can’t solve it, for example when one group type shares a program with others and splitting it would break your pricing or reporting, the limit becomes a process. Make that process hard to skip:
- Build a query of group reservations by date and group type. Include the visit date, group type, status, and number of attendees. Save it where everyone who books groups can run it.
- Check it before confirming. The booking step becomes: run the query for the requested date, count groups of that type, and only confirm if you’re under the limit.
- Use a tentative status for holds. If your group sales setup uses tentative and confirmed statuses, book requests as tentative first and have one person (or one role) confirm. A single gatekeeper is far more reliable than a rule everyone is supposed to remember.
- Review the coming weeks regularly. A weekly look at the query for the next month catches double-bookings while there’s still time to call a teacher and move them.
Picking the right approach
A rough way to decide:
- If the group type has its own price, schedule, or experience, split it into its own program and let capacity enforce the limit.
- If you’re protecting general admission from group overflow, carve out group-only inventory.
- If the group type is mixed into shared programs and the limit is soft (“we try to keep it to three”), a query and a single confirming person is usually enough.
Whatever you choose, write the rule down in plain words: which group types are limited, the number, and whether it’s per day, per slot, or per space. Group sales staff turn over, and the rule tends to drift when it lives only in one coordinator’s head.
Quick answers
Can I set a maximum number of reservations per group type in Altru?
Not as a straightforward setting, as far as we know. Confirm against your own database and release, but plan on using program capacity or a booking check instead.
Will splitting programs mess up my reports?
It adds rows, not confusion, if you name them consistently. Reports and queries can group related programs together, and you gain a cleaner count of how many groups of each type you actually served.
