The doors open at 6:00 for the member preview. By 6:05 there’s a line out to the parking lot, two staff members share one laptop at a folding table, and someone is scrolling a printed attendee list looking for “Smith, J.” Mobile check-in is supposed to prevent exactly this. Whether you can run it entirely inside Altru depends on what kind of event or program you’re checking people into, so it helps to sort that out first.
Start by naming the kind of event
“Check-in” means different things depending on how the attendee got their spot. In Altru, those paths are handled in different parts of the system, and that affects which check-in tools apply.
- Preregistered programs and events. People bought or registered ahead of time through advance sales, group sales, or a web form. You have a name tied to a ticket or registration before anyone arrives.
- Scheduled programs with walk-up sales. Daily programs, timed tours, or shows where some people buy ahead and others buy at the door. Some attendees have a ticket in Altru; some don’t exist yet.
- Special events and fundraisers. Galas, member nights, and donor events that are often tracked differently from ticketed programs, sometimes with guest lists, sponsors, and table assignments.
- Large events. Any of the above where hundreds of people arrive within the same half hour. Here speed and multiple entry points matter more than features.
Write down which category your event falls into before choosing a tool. A setup that works well for a 30-person preregistered workshop can collapse at a 900-person member night.
What Altru gives you natively
Altru tracks tickets and registrations, and depending on how your programs and events are set up, staff may be able to record attendance against them. Whether that can be done comfortably from a phone or tablet browser, and for which kinds of events, is something to confirm on your own setup rather than assume:
- Create a test program or event in a sandbox (or a clearly labeled test event in production).
- Register a few test constituents through each path you actually use: advance sale, web form, group sale, and a walk-up sale at the register.
- Try checking each one in from a phone or tablet browser and note which ones appear, how you search for them, and whether attendance shows up correctly afterward in reports and queries.
- If something you expected is missing, ask Blackbaud support whether it’s a configuration issue or a limit of the feature.
As you test, pay particular attention to two cases: walk-up attendees on scheduled programs, and crowds large enough that searching by name becomes the bottleneck. Those are the situations most likely to need a different approach, so it’s better to find any gaps in a test than at the door.
Name search versus barcode scanning
The biggest speed difference at the door isn’t the device. It’s whether staff search for a person or scan something the person is holding.
Name search works for small groups, and it’s forgiving when someone forgot their confirmation. It slows down fast with common surnames, households registered under one name, and guests who were added by someone else.
Barcode scanning is consistently faster once the volume climbs, because there’s nothing to type and no list to scroll. It depends on every attendee actually receiving a ticket or confirmation with a barcode on it, ideally in an email they can pull up on their phone. If your confirmation emails don’t include a scannable code today, fix that before event day, or scanning won’t help.
Many organizations run both: scanners at the main lanes, and one “help” station with name search for anyone without a code.
Planning check-in for a large event
- Count your lanes. Estimate how many people arrive in the first 20 minutes and how many you can process per minute per station. Add stations until the math works, then add one more.
- Test the Wi-Fi at the actual entrance. Browser-based and app-based check-in both need a connection. Lobbies and outdoor gates are often dead zones. Know whether your tool keeps working if the connection drops.
- Charge and label every device. Assign one person to bring backups and battery packs.
- Decide how walk-ups are handled. Send them to the register to buy a ticket in Altru first, then to a check-in lane. Mixing sales and check-in at the same station is where most lines stall.
- Keep a printed fallback list. Pull a query of registered attendees the morning of the event. You’ll probably never need it, but if you do, you’ll need it badly.
- Reconcile afterward. Run an attendance query the next day and compare it to what the door staff saw. No-shows, duplicates, and guests who were never checked in all show up there, and they affect your follow-up emails and next year’s capacity planning.
Scheduled programs with mixed attendance
For daily programs where some guests prebook and others buy on arrival, the cleanest approach is to make sure every attendee ends up with an Altru ticket, regardless of how they bought. The walk-up buys at the register, gets a ticket, and goes through the same check-in point as everyone else. That keeps attendance counts in one place and avoids staff keeping a separate tally on paper that never makes it back into Altru.
Where Social Good fits
If your bottleneck is scanning volume at the door, Ticket Scanner lets staff scan Altru tickets and membership barcodes on mobile devices, so additional entry lanes can run on mobile devices rather than laptops. It’s worth testing against your own event types alongside Altru’s native options before deciding which to use for each kind of event.
Quick answers
Can I check people in on a phone instead of a laptop?
Often, yes, through a browser-based or app-based tool. Test it with your own programs and on your own network before relying on it.
What about attendees who registered under someone else’s name?
Search by the purchaser’s name, or better, make sure each guest receives their own ticket with a barcode so the question never comes up at the door.
