Altru will happily take money for a lecture, a trivia night, or a behind-the-scenes livestream. What it won’t do is host the stream. There’s no video room inside Altru and no built-in way to hand a buyer a private join link. Selling a virtual event really means connecting two separate jobs: Altru handles the sale and the constituent record, and a meeting or streaming platform handles the experience. Most of the work is in the gap between them.
This guide covers how to set the sale up in Altru, how to choose a platform, and how to get the link to the right people without a lot of manual work.
Step one: decide what kind of thing you’re selling
Altru gives you two broad ways to sell admission to something, and the choice shapes everything downstream.
As a ticketed program
Setting the virtual event up as a program with a scheduled event time lets you sell it through advance sales and your online ticketing, the same way you’d sell a planetarium show or a guided tour. You get price types (member, nonmember, student), capacity, and the familiar order and ticket reports. This works well for recurring series, like a monthly lecture or a weekly online class, where the event looks a lot like your other timed products.
The catch is that ticketing in Altru assumes someone will physically show up. You’ll want to decide what to do about printed or emailed tickets that carry a barcode no one will ever scan, and make sure the confirmation wording doesn’t tell people to “present this at the gate.”
As a fundraising-style event with registrations
Altru’s events area is built for galas, benefits, and other registrations, and it tracks invitees, registrants, and attendance by constituent. For a one-off virtual gala, a donor-only talk, or anything with a giving component, this can be a better fit because the registrant list is easy to work with and the revenue lands where your development team expects it.
If you’re not sure which approach your configuration supports cleanly online, build a test version of each in a sandbox or with a dummy event, buy a ticket yourself, and look at what the buyer actually sees and what lands on the constituent record.
Step two: pick the platform for the actual event
The platform decision is mostly about how interactive the event needs to be and how much you care about link sharing.
- Meeting tools with registration (Zoom-style webinars and meetings) are the common choice for lectures and Q&A. Many can require attendees to register individually, which produces a unique join link per person and makes it harder for one buyer to forward access to a whole mailing list.
- Unlisted or private livestreams are simple and scale well for large audiences, but anyone with the link can watch. Fine for low-price or pay-what-you-wish events, less fine for a premium ticket.
- Trivia, game, and interactive platforms often have their own team or room setup. Check whether they need a list of attendee names or emails ahead of time, because that list will come out of Altru.
Whatever you choose, there won’t be a live connection between it and Altru unless you build or buy one. Plan on moving attendee lists between the two systems as a deliberate step.
Step three: get the join link to buyers
This is where most virtual events stumble. A few workable options, from simplest to most controlled:
- Put the link in the confirmation. If your online sale sends an order confirmation, you may be able to include event-specific text there. Confirm what your confirmation templates can vary by program or event before relying on it. The downside: the link goes out the moment someone buys, sometimes weeks early, and it’s easy to forward.
- Send the link separately, closer to the date. Build a query of everyone who bought or registered for the event, with name and email. Export it a day or two before and send the join details from your email tool. Send a second, last-call message an hour before start, re-running the query to catch late buyers.
- Load attendees into the platform. If your platform supports pre-registration, upload the same query export so each buyer gets their own link from the platform. This gives you the tightest control and per-person attendance data.
Decide who owns the late-buyer problem. Someone will buy ten minutes before start. Either close online sales an hour early, or assign a staff member to watch for new orders and send links by hand during that window.
Details that are easy to miss
- Time zones. Virtual audiences aren’t all local. State the time zone in the event name or description, not just in the confirmation.
- Capacity. Set Altru capacity to match your platform’s seat limit, so you can’t sell a 600th ticket into a 500-person webinar.
- Member pricing. If members get a discount, test the online purchase while logged in as a member to confirm the price applies.
- Recordings. Decide up front whether buyers get a replay and for how long, and say so on the sales page. It reduces refund requests from people who missed it.
- Attendance. Pull the attendee report from your platform afterward. If you want “attended” recorded in Altru for follow-up or reporting, plan how you’ll mark it, since nothing will update it automatically.
- Refunds and no-shows. Write your policy before the first event. Virtual no-show rates tend to be higher than in-person ones, and staff need a consistent answer.
A simple run sheet
For a recurring series, it helps to standardize the steps so the same thing happens every time:
- Create the event in Altru with time zone, capacity, and price types.
- Create the matching session on your platform and note the link.
- Save an attendee query for that event (reuse it each time by changing the event filter).
- Send join details two days out and again an hour before.
- Close online sales shortly before start, or staff the late-buyer window.
- Afterward, send the recording and a thank-you, and record attendance if you track it.
Quick answers
Can Altru stream or host the event itself?
No. Altru handles the sale, the constituent record, and reporting. The event runs on a separate platform.
Can buyers get a unique link automatically?
Not from Altru on its own. The usual route is exporting buyers from a query and loading them into a platform that issues per-person links.
Should virtual events live in the same program as in-person ones?
Keeping them separate makes reporting cleaner and prevents in-person admission wording from appearing on virtual confirmations.
