A school group of sixty is booked for a 10:00 tour in the east gallery, with a classroom program and lunch in the pavilion afterward. Group sales knows all of this. The education coordinator, who just scheduled a members’ event in that same pavilion, doesn’t. A lot of Altru organizations only find the conflict when two groups show up for one room.
The fix people reach for is “just put group reservations on the organization calendar.” What that takes depends on what your Altru calendar actually shows today. In practice it usually means a mix of configuration checks, a good query, and a simple process for copying the right details where other departments will see them.
Start by confirming what your calendar shows now
Altru’s calendar views are built mainly around scheduled programs and events. Group sales reservations live in their own area, with itineraries, itinerary items, locations, and resources attached to each reservation. How much of that reservation detail reaches the organization calendar has changed over the years and can depend on how your site is set up. So don’t assume either way.
Test it in a sandbox, or with a dummy reservation on a date nobody uses:
- Create a group reservation with a scheduled program (a timed tour, for example), a custom itinerary item such as “Lunch,” and a specific location.
- Open the organization calendar for that date and write down what appears: the program time? The group name? The custom item? The location?
- Check it from a non-group-sales user’s login too, since security roles can change what people see.
If scheduled program times show up but custom items and locations don’t, which is a common report, you know which gap you’re filling. If you can’t tell whether something is missing by design or because of a setting, ask Blackbaud support before building workarounds. A ten-minute support case beats a month of duplicate data entry.
Option 1: Build reservations around scheduled program times
Anything booked as a time on a scheduled program is the most likely piece to show up in calendar and capacity views, because it uses the same program event your daily and advance sales use. When a group’s visit is really “the 10:00 guided tour,” book it against that program time instead of describing it in a free-text custom item.
That won’t work for everything. Lunches, bus arrivals, and room setups don’t belong as ticketed programs. But it’s worth checking how many of your custom items are really programs being tracked the hard way.
Option 2: A daily group schedule from a query
For the details that never reach the calendar, a reservation or itinerary query is the most dependable tool. Build one that returns, for a date range:
- Reservation name and group contact
- Itinerary item name (including custom items)
- Start and end time
- Location and any assigned resources
- Expected attendee count and reservation status
Filter out canceled reservations, sort by start time, and save it where education, facilities, and front-of-house staff can run it. Plenty of organizations turn this into a “tomorrow’s groups” report that goes out every afternoon. It isn’t a calendar grid, but it’s accurate, and accuracy is what keeps two groups out of the same room.
Checking for location conflicts
Add a second view of the same query grouped by location and date. Any location with overlapping time ranges is a double-booking. If your events team books rooms through a different part of Altru, test whether the two sides see each other’s bookings before you rely on that, and don’t assume they do.
Option 3: Put placeholder events on the shared calendar
Some teams create a lightweight, non-ticketed event or calendar entry for any group booking that ties up a shared space, named something like “GROUP – Lincoln Elementary – Pavilion.” It’s duplicate entry, so keep it to bookings that block a space other departments might schedule. Make one person in group sales responsible for adding it when the reservation is confirmed and removing it when it’s canceled. Without that owner, placeholders go stale fast.
Option 4: Mirror the schedule into a tool staff already use
If the rest of the building lives in Google Calendar or Outlook, export the daily group query and import it, or have someone paste the next week’s bookings in each Monday. It’s manual, but staff will actually look at it. Just be clear that Altru stays the source: if the shared calendar and the reservation disagree, the reservation wins, and the calendar gets corrected.
Which approach fits
- Conflicts are rare and mostly about tours: book groups against scheduled program times and you may not need anything else.
- Rooms and spaces are the real problem: the location query plus placeholder events is usually enough.
- Several departments need a daily picture: the scheduled query report, sent the afternoon before, does the most for the least effort.
The public side of the same problem
Internal visibility is one half. The other half is making sure group bookings that use up timed capacity are reflected in what the public sees when they buy tickets. Social Good’s Calendar Builder puts an embeddable timed-ticketing calendar on your website with real-time availability pulled from Altru. It’s a public ticketing calendar, not a staff scheduling view, so it doesn’t replace the internal steps above. It does mean online buyers see the availability Altru is actually tracking.
Quick answers
Do custom itinerary items show on the Altru organization calendar?
Don’t count on it. Test with a dummy reservation in your own environment and confirm with Blackbaud support if the result is unclear.
What’s the fastest way to see all group bookings for a day?
A saved itinerary query filtered to that date, sorted by start time, including location and attendee count.
