A new member’s first month is when they decide whether the membership was worth it. A short series of emails (a thank-you, a reminder to visit, a nudge toward the perks they haven’t used yet) does a lot of that work for you. The catch is that Altru is built around sending communications to a list you’ve pulled, not around starting a timed sequence the moment someone joins. So the real question is how to make a list-based tool behave like a welcome series without someone rebuilding it by hand every week.
Start by planning the series on paper
Before touching Altru, decide what the series actually is. Three or four emails is plenty for most organizations. A common shape:
- Day 0 to 2: Welcome and confirmation. Thank them, confirm their membership level and expiration date, and tell them how to get in (card, barcode, name at the desk).
- Around day 10: Plan your first visit. Hours, parking, what’s on now, any member-only entry or hours.
- Around day 30: Benefits they may have missed. Guest passes, shop or café discounts, reciprocal programs, member events.
- Around day 60 to 90 (optional): Ways to go further. Upgrading a level, adding a household member, volunteering, or a gift membership for someone else.
Write the copy once, keep it evergreen, and avoid naming specific exhibits or dates in emails that will run for months. The less you have to edit, the more likely the series keeps running.
Decide who counts as “new”
This is where most welcome series go wrong. A long-time member who renews a week late should not get a “Welcome to the family” email. Decide whether the series goes to:
- Brand-new members only,
- New members plus rejoins (people who lapsed past your grace period and came back), or
- Gift membership recipients as well, who may need a slightly different first email than the purchaser.
Altru’s membership transaction history generally records whether a transaction was a join, renewal, or rejoin, so you can usually filter on that in a membership query. Confirm which values your database actually uses, and how staff have been coding rejoins, before you rely on it. If staff have been processing lapsed members inconsistently, your “new member” list will be noisy until that’s cleaned up.
Build one query per step
The practical way to run a series from Altru is to build a query for each email, each one selecting members whose join date falls in a specific window. For example, if you send every Monday:
- Email 1: joined in the last 7 days.
- Email 2: joined 8 to 14 days ago.
- Email 3: joined 28 to 34 days ago.
Because the windows don’t overlap and each is exactly as wide as your send interval, every new member falls into each list exactly once. Use relative date filters in the query (for example, “in the last 7 days”) rather than fixed dates, so the query keeps working without edits.
Add the usual exclusions to each query: no email address, email opt-outs or solicit codes that block email, and deceased constituents. Include the fields you’ll want to merge into the message, such as first name, membership level, expiration date, and membership or card number.
Sending: what’s realistic natively
Altru has marketing and communications tools for sending email to a selection of constituents, and you can point those at your queries. What we’re less certain about is whether your Altru setup can fully schedule a recurring send off a query with no one touching it each week. That depends on your version and configuration, so test it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before you plan around it.
If it can’t be fully automated, the weekly routine is still manageable: one person, same day each week, refreshes the step queries and sends each email. Put it on a calendar with a named backup, because a series that silently stops when someone goes on vacation is worse than no series at all. Some teams instead export the query results to an outside email platform, which adds timed sequences but also adds a manual export and the risk of sending to someone who opted out in Altru after the export ran.
Keep it from drifting
- Check counts weekly. If the Email 1 list is suddenly empty during a normal week, something changed in how memberships are being coded or the query broke.
- Watch the overlap with renewal reminders. A member who joined eleven months ago shouldn’t be getting welcome content, but a member who joined last week also shouldn’t get a renewal notice. Make sure your renewal queries exclude anyone recently joined.
- Look at what members do afterward. If you can, compare first-year renewal among members who got the full series against those who joined before it existed. That’s the number that tells you whether the series is earning its upkeep.
When the weekly routine becomes the problem
The query-per-step approach works, but it depends on someone running it. That’s the gap Email Designer is built for: it sends automated, branded emails from Altru queries without manual exports, so the same date-window queries described above can drive the welcome series on their own while Altru stays the source of truth for who is a member.
Quick answers
How many emails should a welcome series have?
Three or four over the first one to three months is enough for most cultural organizations. More than that starts competing with your regular newsletter.
Should renewing members get any of it?
Usually not the welcome email itself, but a short “thanks for staying with us” message to renewals is worth considering as a separate, single email.
