A donor RSVPs for your spring gala and brings a guest. Two days before the event, the guest drops out but the donor is still coming. You want Altru to show one seat filled, one seat open, and a clear record that the guest was invited but didn’t attend. That last part is where people get stuck.
The issue is that Altru doesn’t track the person who registered and the people they bring in quite the same way. Once you know what each one can hold, picking the right workaround is easy.
Registrants and guests are not the same kind of record
In Altru special events, the registrant is the constituent tied to the registration. In most cases they’re the one who paid or RSVP’d. Guests hang off that registration. A guest can be a named constituent or just a placeholder (“Guest of Jane Smith”) that gets a name later or never does.
Attendance and “will not attend” options are built mostly around the registrant. Depending on your Altru setup and how the guest was added, a guest row may not have the same status choices. Before you build a process on top of this, open a test event in your sandbox (or a past event nobody reports on), add a registrant with one named guest and one unnamed guest, and see which status options each row gives you. A short test like this keeps you from training staff on something that doesn’t behave the way you expected. If the options still aren’t clear, ask Blackbaud support whether guest-level attendance status is available in your environment.
Three ways to handle a guest who won’t attend
1. Remove the guest from the registration
This is the cleanest option for headcount. The seat goes back to capacity, name badges and seating lists stay accurate, and your attendance numbers aren’t inflated.
The downside is history. You lose the record that this person was ever invited, which matters if you track who gets invited year after year or if the guest is a prospect. Before you remove them, add a note on the registrant’s constituent record (or on the guest’s record, if they’re a named constituent), something like “Invited as guest to Spring Gala, declined.” Keep the wording consistent so a query can find it later.
2. Promote the guest to their own registration
If the guest is a real constituent you care about, like a board prospect or a major donor’s spouse, consider registering them on their own instead of as someone’s guest. Then they get the full set of registrant options, including whatever “will not attend” or declined status your event supports. This means more setup per person, so save it for the guests you’ll want to report on later.
3. Leave the guest in place and flag them
Some teams keep the guest on the registration and mark the decline another way: a constituent attribute, an event-specific note, or a consistent comment. This keeps the full invitation history in one place. The catch is that anything counting guests (capacity, catering numbers, seating charts) will still count this person unless your reports filter them out. If you go this route, build the filter into your headcount query before the event, not the morning of.
Paid events change the math
If the guest’s seat was paid for, the attendance status is the easy part. The money is the harder question: refund, credit, or keep it as a gift? Make that call by policy, and don’t let each event coordinator decide case by case. Then handle the revenue side the way your finance team already handles event refunds, so the registration and the payment tell the same story. Removing a guest from a registration doesn’t refund anyone on its own, and a refund doesn’t necessarily remove the guest. Check both.
Make it consistent across events
- Pick one method per situation and write it down. For example: unnamed guests get removed; named constituents get a note and stay on the record; VIP guests get their own registration.
- Standardize the note or attribute text so a query can find every declined guest across all events, not just this one.
- Build one headcount query per event type that leaves out declined registrants and flagged guests, and have catering, seating, and check-in all use it.
- Re-check the day before. Run the query, compare it to your seating chart, and fix any differences while there’s still time.
Quick answers
Can I mark the registrant as not attending but keep their guest?
This happens when the guest plans to come anyway. The safest route is to register the guest themselves and then update the original registrant’s status. That way the person who actually shows up has a record you can check in.
Will removing a guest free up event capacity?
Generally yes, because capacity is based on the people attached to registrations. Confirm in your sandbox that your event’s capacity count goes down when you remove a test guest.
