December hits, someone calls asking to buy “a gift certificate for my sister’s family,” and your web store has no button for it. The front desk takes the order by phone, writes a code on a card, and hopes someone remembers to record it. Selling gift certificates online through Altru sounds like it should be simple. In practice it depends on what you mean by “gift certificate,” and on what your Altru setup can actually do.
Start by deciding what you are selling
“Gift certificate” covers three different products, and each fits Altru differently:
- A gift membership. The buyer pays for a membership in someone else’s name. This is the most common holiday gift for museums, zoos, and gardens, and it fits naturally into Altru’s membership programs.
- An admission voucher. Prepaid entry for a set number of people, good on any open day. It behaves like a ticket without a date.
- A stored-value certificate. A dollar amount the recipient can spend on admission, the shop, or programs. This is the hardest one to run cleanly, because the balance has to be tracked and drawn down over time.
Before you look at any software, pick which of these you actually want to offer. Many organizations find that a gift membership plus a simple admission voucher covers almost every request, and both are far easier to manage than a running dollar balance.
What Altru handles on its own
Gift memberships are the strongest native option. Altru’s membership web forms and front-desk membership sales are built around the idea that the payer and the member can be different people, so the gift giver and the recipient each get a constituent record. Check how your membership web form handles the “this is a gift” case today, including whether it captures the recipient’s mailing address and whether your acknowledgment goes to the buyer, the recipient, or both.
For admission vouchers and dollar-value certificates, the picture is less clear. Altru’s web forms are designed around memberships, donations, and dated ticket sales, and we are not aware of a standard online form that sells an open-ended voucher or a stored-value balance. Capabilities and configuration options change, so confirm this for your own database: test in a sandbox if you have one, or ask Blackbaud support directly whether your version supports selling vouchers or gift certificates through a web form, and how redemption is tracked.
Workarounds organizations use
Sell admission vouchers as a flexible ticket
Some organizations create a ticket type or program that is not tied to a single date and sell it online like any other admission. The buyer receives a confirmation with a barcode or code, and staff redeem it at the desk. Test this carefully: you need to know how the item shows up in daily sales and advance sales reports, whether it can be scanned or looked up on any day, and how you will stop it from being used twice.
Use a donation or payment form with clear fulfillment steps
Another route is a separate online payment page for gift certificates, with staff fulfilling each order by hand: generating a code, mailing or emailing the certificate, and logging it on the buyer’s constituent record. This works at low volume. It breaks down when the holiday rush brings in dozens of orders a day and the log falls behind.
Keep a redemption log you can query
Whatever you choose, record each certificate in a way you can pull with a query: who bought it, who received it, the code, the value, the purchase date, and whether it has been redeemed. An attribute on the constituent record, or a consistent note format, makes this possible. A spreadsheet kept on someone’s desktop does not.
Talk to finance before launch
Gift certificates are usually not revenue on the day they are sold. Many organizations treat the money as a liability until the certificate is redeemed, which affects how the payment posts and how it lands in your batches and revenue reports. Ask your finance team how they want it recorded before the first sale, not after the year-end close.
Also check expiration rules. Laws on gift certificate expiration dates and unredeemed balances vary by state, so confirm what applies to you before printing “valid for one year” on anything.
A short checklist before you go live
- Choose your product types: gift membership, admission voucher, dollar value, or a mix.
- Confirm with a sandbox test or Blackbaud support what Altru can sell online for each type.
- Decide how the buyer and recipient are recorded as constituents.
- Agree with finance on how the payment posts and when it counts as earned.
- Write the redemption steps for front-desk staff, including what to do with a code they cannot find.
- Build a query that lists unredeemed certificates, and review it monthly.
Where Social Good can help
For gift memberships, the online purchase itself is often the weak spot. Checkouts replaces Altru web forms with a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets, memberships, and donations, with Apple Pay and Google Pay, and the data writes back to Altru. If gift memberships are your main holiday product, that is a practical way to make them easier to buy on a phone without changing how they are recorded in Altru.
Quick answers
Can Altru sell gift memberships online?
Membership web forms are built for memberships where the buyer and member can differ. Test the gift path end to end, including acknowledgments and mailing addresses, before promoting it.
Can Altru track a dollar balance on a gift certificate?
We are not aware of a standard way to do this online. Confirm with Blackbaud support for your configuration, and consider whether a fixed admission voucher would meet the same need with less tracking.
