The phone call usually goes like this: “I bought tickets online last night and never got the email.” Or a donor needs a receipt for their accountant. Or someone bought a membership at the front desk and wants written confirmation. The order is in Altru. The guest just doesn’t have proof of it in their inbox, and someone on staff needs to fix that in the next few minutes.
Resending an acknowledgment in Altru is less direct than most people expect. Below is how to figure out why the original didn’t arrive, what your realistic options are, and what to set up so this stops being a one-off scramble each time.
Start by finding out why it didn’t arrive
Before you resend anything, spend thirty seconds on the cause. If you skip this step, the second email often disappears the same way the first one did.
- Check the email address on the constituent record. Typos are a frequent culprit: a missing letter, “.con” instead of “.com”, a work address the guest no longer checks. Fix it on the record before doing anything else.
- Check for duplicate constituents. If the guest exists twice in Altru, the order may be attached to an older record with an outdated email address. You’ll be looking at one record while the transaction lives on the other.
- Ask them to check spam and promotions folders. Transactional emails from nonprofits land in filters more often than you’d think, especially on school and corporate mail systems.
- Confirm how the sale was made. An online order through a web form and an order entered by staff in daily sales or advance sales don’t behave the same way when it comes to automatic email, which matters for the next step.
What Altru gives you to work with
Acknowledgment emails for online purchases are generally tied to how each web form is configured. That’s useful when everything goes right, but it means the email is triggered by the web transaction itself. Once that moment has passed, there isn’t always an obvious way to fire the same confirmation again from the order.
Sales entered by staff in daily sales or advance sales are a different case. Depending on your setup, those transactions may not send a branded email acknowledgment at all, which is why front-desk and phone orders are where most “can you send me a confirmation?” calls come from.
Altru’s options here have changed over time and vary with configuration, so we won’t pretend there’s a single button that works for everyone. To find out what your instance can do, test it: place a small order in your sandbox (or a test order you refund afterward) and see what email options are available on the completed transaction. If you can’t find a way to resend, ask Blackbaud support whether your version supports it before you build a workaround.
Workarounds staff can use today
For tickets
If the guest mostly needs to get in the door, look up the order by name at admission. Most organizations can find and redeem a valid order without the guest showing an email. If they insist on a copy, staff can usually reprint tickets from the order, or save them and attach them to a regular email. That’s slower, but it works.
For donations and memberships
Donors needing tax receipts and members needing proof of membership are the cases where a proper document matters. One option is to keep a simple acknowledgment letter template in Altru’s marketing and communications area, generate it for that one transaction, and email it as a PDF. Confirm in your sandbox how your instance handles a single-transaction letter before relying on it. It isn’t automatic, but it’s consistent and gives the donor the right information.
A plain email from staff
For low-stakes confirmations, a short email from a staff inbox with the order date, items, and amount is often enough. If you go this route, give staff a template with the exact fields to include (and those to leave out, like full payment details) so you don’t end up with a dozen different versions.
Keep it from turning into a daily chore
Once you’ve handled the immediate guest, a few habits will cut down how often this comes up:
- Read email addresses back at the desk and on the phone. Spelling the address back takes a few seconds and heads off a lot of failed deliveries.
- Merge duplicates regularly. A monthly duplicate review keeps orders attached to the record with the current email address.
- Build a query of recent transactions with missing or invalid email addresses. Review it weekly. Any order on that list never got an acknowledgment, and you can contact those guests before they contact you.
- Decide which staff-entered sales should get a confirmation. If phone and walk-up memberships or donations matter to you, make a policy for how those guests get written acknowledgment instead of leaving it to whoever answers the phone.
Where Social Good fits
If resending confirmations and acknowledging desk sales is taking up real staff time, Email Designer sends automated, branded emails, including eTickets and acknowledgments, based on Altru queries, with no manual exports. Because it works from queries, staff-entered daily sales and advance sales transactions that your query picks up can receive the same kind of email as online orders.
Quick answers
Will fixing the email address on the record resend the original?
Not by itself, as far as we know. Updating the address affects future communications. Test this in your own environment to confirm.
Should we tell guests to just show their ID?
For admission, a lookup by name is usually fine. For donation receipts and membership proof, send a real document. Those guests often need it for someone else.
