You give a radio station 200 free admissions for a giveaway, or a corporate partner gets “the first 500 guests” at half price. You set up a promo code, it goes out, and then it lands on a coupon site. Two weeks later the code has been used far more times than the deal you agreed to.
Capping a code at a set number of total uses is a reasonable thing to want, but Altru’s discount setup doesn’t make it easy. Below is what Altru’s discount setup handles well, where it stops, and the workarounds that hold up in practice.
What Altru discounts control, and what they don’t
Altru discounts are good at scope. You can tie a discount to particular programs, events, or price types, set the dates it’s valid, choose which sales channels can apply it, and require a promo code online. You can also limit how many items in a single order the discount applies to, which stops one buyer from loading forty discounted tickets into one cart.
What isn’t there, as far as we’ve seen, is a built-in counter that switches a code off once it has been redeemed a set number of times across all orders. The per-order limit doesn’t add up across orders, so a code limited to two tickets per transaction can still be used in hundreds of separate transactions. Blackbaud changes Altru over time, so check your own discount setup screens or ask Blackbaud support before you build workarounds. If a total-use limit turns up in your environment, use it and skip the rest of this article.
Workarounds that hold up
1. Watch redemptions with a query and turn the code off yourself
This is the simplest approach and needs no extra setup. Build a revenue or sales query that filters on the discount and counts the orders or items it was applied to. Save it, put it on someone’s weekly checklist (daily during a big promotion), and when the count gets close to your cap, end-date the discount or make it inactive.
- Set a buffer. If the cap is 500, plan to shut the code off around 450, because orders keep coming in between your checks.
- Decide ahead of time who turns the code off and who tells the partner. Otherwise the query gets run, nobody acts, and the overage keeps growing.
- If you use a tool that copies Altru query results into a spreadsheet, you can show the running count there so marketing can see it without logging in to Altru.
2. Keep the window short
A code that’s valid for three weekends gets passed around far less than one with no end date. Start and end dates are the one hard stop Altru reliably enforces, so give every capped promotion an end date, even if it’s later than you expect to need.
3. Give each partner its own code
If one code goes to five partners, a leak through any of them uses up everyone’s allotment, and you can’t tell where it happened. Separate discounts (or at least separate codes) for each partner keep each count small and easy to track. When one code turns up on a deal site, you can turn off just that one.
4. Use capacity instead of a code
For fixed giveaways, a limited inventory often works better than a discount. Capacity limits on timed events and programs are enforced at the point of sale. Consider setting up a dedicated promo event or program with its own capacity and price, and sharing that link only with the partner. When it sells out, it sells out, without anyone watching a query. This takes more setup, so test it in your sandbox first to confirm how capacity and price types behave together in your configuration.
5. Don’t use a code at all for truly fixed counts
For things like 50 comp tickets for a board event, it’s often cleaner to issue the tickets through advance sales or group sales at the desk and send them out yourself. Online promo codes work best for open-ended promotions. Tightly counted allotments usually do better as staff-issued transactions.
Tell partners how the cap works
Unless you’re enforcing the limit with capacity, it will be soft. Put that in the agreement: “up to 500 redemptions, valid through June 30, code may be retired early once the limit is reached.” That protects you if a few extra orders get through before someone ends the code, and it sets the expectation that you may turn the code off early.
Also decide what you’ll do with orders over the cap. Honoring them is usually the kinder call, because canceling a family’s tickets over a code they were given rarely makes sense. Still, make that decision on purpose, before it comes up.
Where Social Good fits
Discount rules and caps are mostly decided by how you set them up in Altru, so start with the steps above. Social Good’s Checkouts replaces Altru web forms with a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets, memberships, and donations, and the orders still write back to Altru. It doesn’t change how Altru counts discount redemptions, so the steps above still apply.
Quick answers
Does the per-transaction limit cap total uses?
No. It limits how many items one order can discount. Every new order starts over.
Can I make single-use codes for each recipient?
We haven’t seen this handled natively in Altru discounts. Check with Blackbaud support before you promise one-time codes to a partner.
What’s the most reliable hard limit?
Capacity on a dedicated event or program, combined with an end date. Both are enforced at the point of sale instead of after the fact.
