A family buys four timed tickets on your website at 9:40 p.m. Two emails show up. One says “Thank you for your purchase,” with an order summary. The other has the tickets. The next morning one of them is in the promotions tab, the other is in spam, and the parent at your entry gate is scrolling through a receipt looking for a barcode that was never in it.
Guests expect one message: here’s what you paid, here’s what gets you in. Below is an honest look at why Altru setups often end up sending two, what you can adjust in Altru itself, and what it takes to get to a single confirmation.
Why the receipt and the ticket travel separately
In Altru, the purchase confirmation (the acknowledgement or receipt) and the e-ticket are generally produced by different parts of the system. The acknowledgement comes from the sale itself: what was bought, the amount, the payment. The e-ticket is a ticket document tied to the specific event or timed entry, with its barcode. Because they’re generated and delivered separately, the out-of-the-box result for online and advance sales is often two emails, sometimes a few minutes apart.
Whether your particular configuration can merge them natively depends on your web form setup, your email templates, and what merge fields are available to you. We’d rather not guess on your behalf. Before you build anything, confirm it: run a test purchase in a sandbox or a low-stakes event, and ask Blackbaud support directly whether your acknowledgement template can carry the ticket barcode or a link to the ticket. Get the answer in writing so the next administrator doesn’t have to ask again.
Things worth doing even if you keep two emails
If combining them isn’t possible in your setup, you can still make the pair much harder to miss.
- Tell guests the second email is coming. Add a clear line near the top of the receipt: “Your tickets arrive in a separate email from [sender name] within a few minutes. Bring that one to the gate.” It is a small change, and it heads off a lot of confusion at the gate.
- Use the same sender name and a matching subject pattern. “Your order, [Org name]” and “Your tickets, [Org name]” sit next to each other in an inbox. Mismatched senders get sorted into different folders.
- Put the visit date and time in both subject lines. Guests search their inbox for the date, not for your organization’s name.
- Check deliverability for the ticket email specifically. If the ticket message has a different from-address or is heavier on images, it may land in spam more often than the receipt. Send test purchases to Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail accounts and see where each one lands.
- Give the front line a lookup habit. Staff should know how to find an order by guest name or email and resend or reprint the tickets without hunting around. Write the steps down for seasonal staff.
Phone and walk-up advance sales
Advance sales taken by staff tend to be where the two-email problem gets worse, because the guest isn’t watching a confirmation screen. Make it part of the script: confirm the email address back to the caller letter by letter, tell them to expect both messages, and note on the order that tickets were emailed. A mistyped email address is behind a lot of “I never got my tickets” calls, and no template change fixes that.
Getting to one confirmation email
If you want a true single message, with order details, amount paid, and the ticket barcode or ticket link together, the practical route is to send that email from something that reads the completed sale from Altru rather than relying on two separate built-in messages. A few questions to settle before you go that way:
- What has to be in it? At minimum: guest name, visit date and entry time, ticket types and quantities, total paid, the barcode or ticket link, and your cancellation or exchange policy.
- Which sales does it cover? Online only, or advance sales and group sales too? Each channel may need its own trigger.
- How fast does it have to arrive? For same-day timed entry, a delay of more than a few minutes matters. Ask any option how quickly it picks up new orders.
- What happens to the built-in emails? If you add a combined email, plan to turn off or reword the original ones, or guests will get three messages instead of two.
How Social Good handles it
Our Email Designer sends automated, branded emails, including eTickets and acknowledgments, from Altru queries without manual exports. That makes it possible to design one confirmation that pairs the order details with the ticket, while Altru keeps the sale, the constituent, and the tickets.
Quick answers
Will guests be turned away if they only have the receipt?
That depends on your gate process. If staff can look up the order by name, no. If entry depends on scanning a barcode, the receipt alone usually isn’t enough, which is why the “second email is coming” line matters.
Can we just attach the tickets to the receipt by hand?
For a handful of group or VIP orders, sure. For daily online sales it doesn’t scale, and it’s easy to send the wrong tickets to the wrong person.
