“How many people came on Saturdays last year?” sounds like a one-minute question. In Altru it often turns into an afternoon, because the reports you already use are built around date ranges, not days of the week. You can get to the answer, though, and once the setup is right you can rerun it whenever the board, the education team, or the staffing schedule needs it.
Here’s how I’d approach it, starting with the part people usually skip.
Decide what “attendance” means before you build anything
Weekday reports go wrong most often because two people pull “attendance” from two different places and get two different numbers. Pick one definition and write it at the top of the spreadsheet:
- Tickets sold for that day. Daily sales plus advance sales for a given visit date. Good for revenue and capacity planning, but it counts no-shows.
- Tickets redeemed or scanned. Closer to who actually walked in, if your organization scans consistently at the door.
- Member visits. Whether these show up depends on how you check members in. If members are waved through without a scan or a zero-dollar ticket, they won’t be in any ticket-based count.
- Group sales and programs. School groups and events may live in a different part of Altru than general admission. Decide whether they belong in the number.
The other key choice is which date you report on. A ticket bought on a Wednesday for a Saturday visit should count toward Saturday. Make sure you filter and group on the visit or event date, not the transaction date.
Build a query that returns one row per day
The cleanest base is an ad-hoc query in Altru that pulls the visit date and a quantity for the year you care about. Roughly:
- Start from the query source that matches your definition above (ticket or sales-related sources for sold tickets; whatever source holds your scan or redemption records for actual entries).
- Filter the date field to the full period, for example January 1 through December 31.
- Add the visit date and ticket quantity to the output. Include program or price type if you want to separate general admission from everything else.
- If the query lets you summarize, group by date so you get one row per day with a total. If not, export the detail rows; you can total them in a spreadsheet.
Query sources and field names vary with your Altru setup and permissions, so expect to poke around a bit. If you’re not sure which source holds redemption data, test against a single day you already know the count for. If the numbers match your daily attendance sheet, you’ve found the right one.
Add the day of week
This is where Altru gets awkward. I haven’t found a dependable built-in way to filter a query to “Saturdays only,” and I wouldn’t promise one exists in your version. Check the date filter options in your query designer, and ask Blackbaud support if you’d rather confirm than test. Until then, two workarounds hold up:
Option 1: Calculate it in a spreadsheet
Export the query to Excel or Google Sheets and add a column with a weekday formula pointing at the date column, such as =TEXT(A2,”dddd”), which returns “Saturday,” “Sunday,” and so on. Then build a pivot table with the weekday as rows and summed quantity as values. You get every day of the week side by side, which usually answers the next question before anyone asks it.
Check that the exported dates are real dates, not text. If the formula returns the date itself or an error, convert the column to a date format first.
Option 2: Filter on a list of dates in Altru
If the answer has to come straight out of Altru, set the date filter to “one of” (or a similar multi-value option, if your query offers it) and enter every Saturday in the year. It’s tedious, and you’ll need to redo it each year, but it keeps everything inside Altru. A spreadsheet can generate the list of dates for you to copy.
Sanity-check the result
- Add up all seven weekdays and compare the total to your annual attendance figure. A big gap usually means a missing program or ticket type.
- Look for days you were closed. A Saturday with zero attendance might be a closure, a weather day, or a filter problem.
- Note holidays and special events separately. One huge Saturday festival can skew an average, so consider reporting the median as well.
- If members matter to the question, report them as a separate line so it’s obvious whether they’re included.
Make it repeatable
Save the query with a clear name and description that spell out the attendance definition you chose. Next time, you only change the date range. If staff will ask for this monthly (for example, to plan weekend staffing), keep the spreadsheet with the formulas and pivot table and paste fresh exports into the same tab.
That paste step is the part that wears thin. Data Bridge from Social Good syncs Altru query results to Google Sheets, so the weekday formula and pivot table can sit on top of data that updates without someone exporting it by hand. The query and the attendance definition are still yours to set up in Altru.
Quick answers
Can I compare Saturdays across several years?
Yes. Widen the date range, then add a year column next to the weekday column (for example =YEAR(A2)) and use both in the pivot table.
Why doesn’t my weekday total match the daily attendance report?
Usually because one is using the transaction date and the other the visit date, or because one includes members or groups and the other doesn’t. Line up the definitions and the totals should match.
