Summer camp is ticketing with a lot more going on. A parent isn’t buying admission for one afternoon. They’re signing a specific child up for a specific week, giving you allergy and pickup details, maybe taking a member discount, and expecting a confirmation they can forward to a co-parent. Altru can handle a lot of that, but only if the camp is built with the online sale in mind from day one. A camp that’s quick to sell at the desk can be hard to sell on the web.
This guide goes through the setup choices that matter most for online camp registration, where Altru tends to fall short, and how to test the whole thing before registration opens.
Step 1: Decide what one “seat” is
Everything else follows from this. Most institutions model camp as a program with scheduled events, where each event is one session: “Junior Naturalists, Week of June 15,” for example. Capacity sits on the event, so each week sells out on its own.
Questions to settle before you build anything:
- Week by week, or whole summer? If families can pick individual weeks, each week needs to be its own event with its own capacity. A full-summer bundle is easier to build but harder to change once kids start dropping individual weeks.
- Age groups. Running “Ages 5–7” and “Ages 8–10” in the same week as separate events keeps capacity honest. If you put both on one event with two price types, nothing stops one age group from taking every seat.
- Half day versus full day, and aftercare. Decide whether these are separate events, separate price types, or add-on items. Price types are simplest, but they don’t control capacity separately.
Pick a naming convention you can stick with. Parents will see these names on the web, and staff will search for them in reports all season.
Step 2: Set prices the way parents will see them
Member versus nonmember pricing is the usual first requirement. Altru can tie price types to membership, but how a member discount gets applied online depends on whether the buyer is logged in or otherwise identified as a member when they check out. Test that path with a real member record. Don’t assume it works because the desk can apply the discount by hand.
Sibling discounts, early-bird pricing, and scholarships are where native setups usually get awkward. Discounts and promo codes can cover some of it. If you need something like “second child in the same week is 10% off” applied automatically, check in a test environment, or ask Blackbaud support, whether your version supports that rule on the web before you advertise it.
Step 3: Collect the child’s information, not just the buyer’s
This is the biggest difference between camp and general admission. The person paying is a parent, but the person attending is a child, and your camp staff need that child’s name, age or grade, allergies, medications, emergency contact, and who’s allowed to pick them up.
Things to work out:
- Where the child lives in Altru. Some organizations create a constituent for each child linked to the parent’s household. Others store camper details only as registration information on the sale. The household approach gives you multi-year history (“returning camper”), but it creates more records, and duplicate children are common when parents spell a name differently from year to year.
- Required questions. Confirm which registration questions your online form can make required, and what kinds of answers it accepts. A free-text allergy field nobody fills in doesn’t help anyone.
- Waivers and photo releases. If you need a signed waiver, find out whether you can capture acceptance during checkout or need a separate step. Many camps end up collecting waivers outside Altru and matching them up later. That’s fine if someone owns the matching.
Step 4: Plan for the things that happen after the sale
Online camp sales create work that ticket sales don’t:
- Sold-out weeks and waitlists. Native waitlist handling for program events is limited. Plenty of teams use a simple interest form and contact families by hand when a seat opens up. Decide your approach before the first week sells out, not after.
- Deposits and balances. If you take a deposit at registration and the balance later, check how that will post to revenue and who follows up on unpaid balances.
- Swaps and refunds. Write the policy down: deadline, fees, and whether a change of week counts as a refund plus a new sale. Front desk staff will get these calls.
- Rosters. Build the roster query early, with camper name, age, allergies, and pickup contacts by event, and check it against a test registration. Counselors need it on day one.
Step 5: Do a full dress rehearsal
Before registration opens, have someone outside the education department register a “child” for two different weeks on a phone, as a member and then as a nonmember. Then check:
- Capacity dropped by the right amount on the right events.
- The member price applied without staff stepping in.
- Every registration answer shows up on the roster query.
- The confirmation email names the camper, the week, the drop-off time, and what to bring.
- The revenue landed where finance expects it.
Then reverse those test transactions so they don’t distort your counts.
About the checkout itself
Parents tend to register at night, on their phones, with a calendar open in another tab. If your standard Altru web form is clunky on mobile or doesn’t look like your website, some of those parents will give up before they finish. Social Good’s Checkouts is a branded, mobile-friendly checkout that replaces the Altru web form, supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, and writes the sale back to Altru. Your program setup, capacity, and reporting stay in Altru.
Quick answers
Can one parent register two kids in one transaction?
Usually yes, as two registrations in the same order. Make sure your form collects details for each child separately, not once per order.
Should camp be set up as a membership add-on instead?
Rarely. Camp has dates, capacity, and attendee details, which is what programs and events are for.
