The best time to ask a visitor how their day went is the morning after, while they still remember the exhibit that was closed and the café line that moved fast. The trouble is that a ticket scan at your gate is an attendance event, not a marketing event. Altru records that the visit happened, but nothing about the scan itself sends a message to anyone.
So the practical question isn’t “how do I make the scanner send an email.” It’s “how do I turn yesterday’s scanned tickets into a clean list, every day, and get a message to that list without someone exporting a spreadsheet each morning.” That framing makes the whole thing much easier to build.
Instant versus next-day
It’s worth deciding early whether you actually need an email within minutes of the scan. For a thank-you or a survey, you almost never do. A message that lands while the family is still walking from the parking lot gets ignored. One that arrives the next morning, or that evening after closing, gets read.
That matters because a once-a-day send built on a query is something you can run against Altru data. A true real-time trigger tied to the scan event is a different kind of integration, and I wouldn’t assume Altru offers it natively. If you think you need it, ask Blackbaud support directly what your version supports before you design around it.
Building the “visited yesterday” audience
Everything starts with a query. The exact fields available depend on how your organization sells and scans tickets, so test this in a sandbox or against a known day’s attendance before trusting it.
Who should be in it
- Visit date equals yesterday. Use a relative date filter rather than a fixed date, so the same query works every day without editing.
- Tickets that were actually redeemed. If your scanning process marks tickets as scanned or redeemed in Altru, filter on that. If it doesn’t, you are emailing people who bought, not people who came, and your wording needs to account for no-shows.
- A usable email address. Daily sales at the window often capture no email at all. Advance and online sales usually do. Expect your list to skew heavily toward online buyers.
- Email consent. Respect whatever solicit codes or communication preferences your team uses. A survey is still email to a person who may have opted out.
Who should be left out
- Group sales and school visits. The person whose email is on the order is a teacher or tour coordinator, not the visitor. Give them a separate follow-up, or none.
- Members who visit often. A member who comes every Saturday does not want a weekly “How was your visit?” Exclude anyone surveyed in the last 60 or 90 days.
- Duplicate constituents. If the same person exists twice in Altru, they get two emails. Admissions data is a common source of duplicates, since separate purchases can end up on separate records.
- Households. Decide whether one message per household is enough. Usually it is.
Getting the email out
Once the query is reliable, you have a few ways to send.
- Manual export. Someone runs the query each morning, exports it, and uploads it to your email platform. This works and costs nothing, but it stops the first week that person is out sick or busy with a school group.
- Altru’s own communication tools. Altru has marketing and communications features, and some organizations use them for acknowledgments and appeals. Whether they can run a recurring, query-driven send on a schedule without staff involvement is something to confirm with Blackbaud before you rely on it.
- A sync or automation layer. Push the query results to your email platform automatically, or send directly from the query on a schedule. This is the only option that keeps running when nobody is thinking about it.
What to put in the message
Keep the post-visit email short and give it one job. If the job is a survey, put the survey link near the top and say how long it takes. Three to five questions is plenty: overall rating, likelihood to recommend, what they enjoyed, and one open text box. A long survey sent to everyone gets worse data than a short one people finish.
A few other habits that pay off:
- Mention the visit date so the message doesn’t feel generic.
- Add a single secondary ask at the bottom, such as membership for non-members or an upcoming event, but don’t let it crowd the survey.
- Store survey responses somewhere you can match back to the constituent, even if that’s just a spreadsheet with the lookup ID, so feedback isn’t disconnected from the visit.
- Read the open-text answers weekly. That’s where you learn the restroom sign is wrong.
A rollout order that works
Start with the query alone for a week and spot-check it against your gate counts. Then send manually for a week or two and watch response rates and unsubscribes. Only after the list and the message both look right should you automate it. Automating a bad query just sends the wrong email faster.
Where Social Good fits
If the manual export is the part that keeps breaking, our Email Designer sends automated, branded emails, including post-visit messages, directly from Altru queries without manual exports. You still build and own the “visited yesterday” query, and Email Designer sends from it.
Quick answers
Can I send a survey to walk-up visitors who paid cash?
Only if you collected an email at the window. Many organizations add an optional email prompt at the point of sale for exactly this reason.
Should members get the same survey?
Usually a separate, less frequent one. Member feedback is about the program as much as the visit, and over-surveying frequent visitors drives unsubscribes.
