A guest buys timed tickets for a Saturday morning six weeks out. By the time Saturday arrives, the confirmation email is buried, they’ve forgotten the entry time, and they show up at noon asking why their 10:00 slot “didn’t work.” A short reminder two days before the visit prevents most of that. The catch is that Altru is built to record the sale, not to keep talking to the buyer on a schedule afterward.
This guide covers what Altru gives you for pre-visit reminders, how to build a reliable reminder routine with the tools you already have, and where the manual parts tend to break down.
What Altru handles on its own, and what it doesn’t
Altru sends confirmation emails at the moment of purchase or registration through its web forms, and its marketing and communications tools can send email to a list of constituents. What it does not appear to offer is a “send this message X days before the event date” trigger tied to each ticket or registration. If you’ve heard otherwise for your version, test it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before you design around it. We’d rather you confirm than assume.
In practice, that means a reminder in Altru is a recurring task: someone pulls the right people for an upcoming date and sends them a message. The rest of this guide is about making that task accurate and fast.
Step one: decide which reminders you actually need
Not every sale deserves a reminder. Start with the ones where a forgotten detail costs you something:
- Timed general admission. Entry windows, parking, and what to bring.
- Ticketed programs and events. Start times, check-in location, accessibility notes, weather plans for outdoor events.
- Free registrations. No-shows tend to be more common when nobody paid, so a reminder doubles as a “can’t make it? let us know” prompt that frees up capacity.
- Group visits. Usually better handled as a personal email or call to the group contact than a mass message.
Pick one or two to start. A reminder routine that runs every week for one program beats an ambitious plan nobody keeps up with.
Step two: build a query that finds tomorrow’s (or Thursday’s) guests
The query is the heart of the whole process. Build a constituent or sales query that returns buyers or registrants for a specific event or program on a specific date. A few things make it hold up over time:
- Filter on the event or program date, not the sale date. You want everyone visiting on the target day, regardless of when they bought.
- Use a relative date if your query tool allows it. A filter like “event date is two days from today” means you can rerun the same saved query every day without editing it. If relative dates don’t work for your setup, keep one query and change the date each time, but name it clearly so nobody sends Saturday’s reminder to Sunday’s guests.
- Return one row per buyer, not per ticket. A family of five shouldn’t get five emails.
- Exclude refunds and cancellations. Check that cancelled orders actually drop out of your results. A reminder sent to someone who already got a refund is an easy mistake to make and an awkward one to explain.
- Include the fields you’ll want in the message. Entry time, program name, and quantity are the useful ones. Generic “see you soon” reminders are far less helpful than “your entry time is 10:00.”
- Respect email preferences. A visit reminder is generally a transactional message, but check with whoever owns your communication policy, and at minimum skip records with no email or a known bad address.
Run the query against a past date first and spot-check a dozen results against the actual sales. If the numbers don’t match your attendance for that day, fix the query before anyone gets an email.
Step three: pick a timing and stick to it
Two days before is a good default for general admission, since it gives people time to rearrange plans or ask questions. For evening events or programs with prep (camps, workshops, tours with dress requirements), a week out plus a day-before note works well. Whatever you choose, assign it to a named person and a specific weekday. Reminders that depend on someone remembering are the first thing dropped when the desk gets short-staffed.
Step four: write a reminder people will actually read
- Put the date and time in the subject line.
- Lead with the one detail that causes the most trouble at your site: parking, the entrance to use, or the timed-entry rule.
- Tell them how to bring their tickets, whether that’s on a phone, printed, or by name at the desk.
- Include a way to cancel or reschedule if your policy allows it. Freed-up capacity on a sold-out day is worth a lot.
- Keep it short. This is not the place for a membership pitch or a donation ask.
Where the manual routine breaks down
The query-and-send approach works, but it has predictable weak spots. Purchases made after you pull the list don’t get a reminder. A sick day means nobody sends it. Exporting to a separate email tool creates a copy of your data that’s out of date as soon as it’s made. And if you run several programs, the number of saved queries and sends grows quickly. If you’re doing this by hand, keep a simple log of each send (date, query, number of recipients) so gaps are easy to spot.
Automating the send
If the manual step is the problem, Email Designer from Social Good sends branded, automated emails from your Altru queries without manual exports. You still build and own the query in Altru, so a reminder query like the one above can drive the message instead of someone exporting and sending it by hand.
Quick answers
Can I use the Altru confirmation email as a reminder?
Not really. It goes out at purchase, which may be weeks before the visit. Reminders need to arrive close to the date.
Should members with free admission get reminders?
Only if they reserved a specific time or program. Members who just walk in don’t have a date to be reminded of.
