Parking passes, audio guides, a boxed lunch for the field trip, a materials fee for the Saturday art class, a behind-the-scenes tour slot. Visitors will happily buy these when they’re buying the ticket. Ask them to come back later through a second link and most of them won’t bother.
The hard part in Altru is that the online ticket and program purchase flow was built to sell admission, not a cart of extras. There are still several ways to get add-ons in front of buyers. Which one fits depends on what the add-on actually is, so it helps to sort your add-ons before you build anything.
First, sort your add-ons into three kinds
- Attached to a person. One per ticket, no limit of its own: an audio guide, a lunch, a program materials fee. It goes up and down with the ticket count.
- Limited on its own. It has its own capacity or time slot: a 20-person keeper talk, a planetarium show, a parking lot that fills up. Selling more of it than you have is a real problem.
- Attached to the order. One per purchase, regardless of party size: a parking pass for the car, a donation, a membership upgrade.
Each kind maps to a different approach in Altru.
Option 1: Build the add-on into a price type
For per-person add-ons, the simplest route is a second price type on the same program or event, such as “Adult” and “Adult with audio guide,” or “Child” and “Child plus lunch.” The buyer picks the bundled price on the same web form they already use, and the revenue lands on one transaction.
This works well when you have one or two extras. It gets messy fast if you try to cover every combination, because the price list on the form doubles each time you add another option. Two other things to plan for:
- Revenue split. If finance needs the audio guide income separate from admission, check how your price types post to designations or GL accounts before you launch. A bundled price usually lands as one amount.
- Fulfillment. Staff need to know who bought the add-on. Make sure the price type name prints on the ticket or shows in the daily attendance or order report your front line actually uses.
Option 2: Make it a separate program or event
For add-ons with their own capacity, set them up as their own program or scheduled event so Altru tracks capacity separately. That’s the only reliable way to avoid selling a 21st seat on a 20-person tour.
The tradeoff is that the buyer now makes two purchases unless your web form setup lets them pick both in one order. Whether a single Altru web form can sell tickets for more than one program in the same checkout depends on the form type and how it’s configured, and it has changed over time. Test it in your sandbox, or ask Blackbaud support directly, before promising your marketing team a single cart.
If it does end up as two purchases, close the gap as much as you can:
- Put a direct link to the add-on form on the ticket confirmation page and in the confirmation email.
- Use the same names and dates in both places so the buyer doesn’t have to hunt for their slot.
- Build a query that finds ticket buyers for a given date who did not buy the add-on, so you can follow up a few days before the visit if capacity remains.
Option 3: Handle order-level items after the sale
Parking, donations, and membership upgrades don’t fit neatly into a per-ticket price. Many organizations sell parking as its own program with one unit per vehicle, and they ask for the donation or the upgrade in the confirmation email rather than on the ticket form.
Membership upgrades are worth extra care. A visitor who just paid for a family of four is the best possible prospect, but if you discount the upgrade by the ticket price, someone has to credit that amount correctly. Write the rule down for whoever processes these, or the desk will handle each case differently.
Before you launch any of these
- Refunds and exchanges. Decide what happens to the add-on when a ticket is refunded or moved to another date. A bundled price type moves with the ticket. A separate program purchase does not, and staff have to remember to change both.
- Reporting. Run a test purchase and confirm the add-on shows up where finance and operations expect it, by date and by revenue category.
- Mobile. Walk through the purchase on a phone. Long price lists that look fine on a desktop become a scrolling problem on a small screen, and that’s often where buyers drop the add-on.
- Scanning. If the add-on needs to be verified at a door (a tour, a parking gate), make sure it produces something staff can check.
Where Social Good fits
The approaches above are all doable in Altru on its own. If you want add-ons offered inside the purchase itself, our checkout includes Upsells, which lets you offer memberships and add-ons in the cart alongside tickets. The orders still write back to Altru, so your existing reporting setup continues to work.
Quick answers
Can I just sell add-ons as merchandise online?
Altru handles merchandise at the point of sale, but online support for selling merchandise alongside tickets is limited and depends on your setup. Confirm with Blackbaud support before you plan around it.
What’s the fastest thing to try this week?
A bundled price type for your single most popular add-on, plus a link to anything else in the confirmation email. Both use tools you already have.
