Picture a parent planning a summer: three Saturday workshops from the same family program, one ticket each, maybe two adults on the last one. They find the first date, add tickets, land in the cart, then go back to the event page, pick the next date, and repeat. By the third pass, some of them give up and call the box office. Others buy one session and never come back for the rest.
That back-and-forth is the core complaint with selling several events from one program online in Altru. Below is what is going on, what you can adjust inside Altru, and the honest limits of each workaround.
Why buyers end up looping through the cart
Altru’s online ticketing is built around a buyer choosing a program, then a date or event, then quantities, then adding that selection to the cart. The cart itself can hold more than one item, so a multi-event order is possible. What is usually missing is a single screen where a buyer sees every event in a program at once and enters quantities across several of them before heading to checkout.
How much of this you can change depends on your Altru version, how your web forms were set up, and how your program and event records are structured. Blackbaud has adjusted online sales behavior over time, so before you redesign anything, confirm current behavior with Blackbaud support or test it on a sandbox or a low-stakes program. Don’t take anyone’s word for it, including ours.
Options inside Altru
1. Restructure how the program is set up
If buyers almost always purchase the whole series, the cleanest fix is often not a better multi-event screen. It is a different product. Consider selling the series as a single item (a series pass or registration) and handling attendance by date on the back end. One add-to-cart, one transaction, one line in revenue. The tradeoff is reporting: you lose per-date sales counts unless you track attendance another way, and you need a refund policy for people who miss a session.
2. Keep events separate, but shorten the loop
When people really do pick and choose dates, focus on making each pass through the cart shorter:
- Link straight to each event. On your own website, list every date in the program with a direct link to that event’s purchase page rather than a single link to the program’s landing form. Buyers then jump from the cart back to your list, not back through the whole selection flow.
- Tell buyers the cart holds. A single line near the add-to-cart step (“Your tickets stay in your cart while you add more dates”) prevents people from checking out after the first event because they assume they have to.
- Trim price types. Every extra price type on an event is another decision per pass. If a program only realistically sells adult and child, hide the rest from the web.
- Check cart timeouts. If held tickets expire quickly, a buyer adding four dates may lose the first one while picking the last. Test a full multi-date order at a normal pace and see whether anything drops.
3. Route larger orders offline
For schools, scout troops, and families booking a whole season, a phone or email path into group sales or a staff-entered sale is often faster for everyone than any web form. Say so on the program page, with a named contact. It is not elegant, but it captures orders the web flow would lose.
Things to decide before changing anything
- How do people actually buy this program? Run a query on recent orders for the program and look at how many contain more than one event. If almost every order is one date, the loop is an annoyance, not a revenue problem.
- Is there abandonment you can see? Compare people who bought the first date of a series against people who bought later dates. A steep drop can mean the purchase flow, not interest, is the problem.
- Who owns the web form changes? Edits to program, event, and price setups affect the front desk too. Coordinate with whoever runs daily sales so a web-only tweak doesn’t confuse onsite staff.
When the web form itself is the bottleneck
If you’ve restructured what you can and the buying experience is still the sticking point, the remaining option is a different checkout in front of Altru. Social Good’s Checkouts replaces Altru web forms with a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets, memberships, and donations, supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, and writes the sale back to Altru. Whether it fits your specific multi-event program is worth walking through on a demo with your actual program setup rather than assuming either way.
Quick answers
Can an Altru cart hold tickets for several events at once?
Generally yes; the friction is in getting them into the cart one event at a time, not in checking out with several. Test your own forms to confirm.
Will a series pass break my attendance reports?
It changes them. You’ll see one sale per buyer instead of one per date, so plan how you’ll count attendance (scanning, a check-in list, or a separate tracking query) before you switch.
