Membership levels are easy to add in Altru and surprisingly hard to take away. Every level you create shows up in the sales screens, on your web forms, in renewal notices, in queries, and in every report your board asks for. So the real work isn’t the setup. It’s deciding what the structure should be before you build it, and keeping it small enough that staff and members can both explain it.
Below is how we’d think through a level structure for a museum, zoo, garden, or historic site running memberships in Altru.
Start with who walks in the door, not with price points
The most common mistake is designing levels around revenue targets (“we need a $250 tier”) instead of around the groups that actually buy. Before touching Altru, pull a year of membership sales and answer three questions:
- How many people does a typical membership cover? If most of your members are two adults plus kids, your core level should be built for that household, not for an individual.
- Who brings guests? Grandparents, caregivers, and nannies often drive the demand for “plus guest” or “named adult plus any one adult” options.
- Who joins to give, not to visit? Upper levels usually behave more like annual giving than admission. They need different benefits and different follow-up.
Those answers usually produce three groups: an entry level, a household level, and a supporter or patron band. Most organizations need fewer levels than they think.
A workable shape
There’s no single correct structure, but this pattern holds up well in Altru because each level has a clear reason to exist:
- Individual (one named adult). Sometimes paired with a senior or student version.
- Dual (two named adults, or one named adult plus a guest).
- Family / Household (two adults plus children in the household). This is often your volume level.
- Family Plus (adds guest passes or a flexible extra adult). Good for grandparents and caregiver situations.
- Supporter levels (two or three tiers, priced higher, with benefits tied to recognition, events, and reciprocal programs rather than more admissions).
If you can’t explain the difference between two adjacent levels in one sentence at the front desk, merge them.
Decisions to settle before you build
One program or several?
Altru groups levels under membership programs. A single program with an ordered set of levels keeps upgrades and downgrades straightforward, because members move between levels in the same program. Separate programs make sense when the membership is genuinely different: a corporate program, a young-professionals group with its own events, or a reciprocal-only offering. Splitting just to organize your list tends to complicate reporting and renewals later.
Term length and renewal behavior
Decide whether every level runs on the same term (usually 12 months) and how you want early and late renewals to date the new term. Much of this is configured on the membership program rather than level by level, so check which settings in your setup are shared across the program before you assume one group can behave differently. If one group genuinely needs a different renewal rule, that’s a sign it may belong in its own program.
Who is on the card
Settle how many named members and cards each level allows, and whether children are named or simply covered. This drives how households and constituent records get created in Altru. Loose rules here are a common source of duplicate records, because staff add a new constituent rather than finding the existing one.
Benefits you can actually track
List each benefit per level and ask how you’ll verify it. Free admission is checked at the gate. Guest passes, store discounts, parking, and event invitations each need a way to be tracked, whether that’s a benefit recorded on the level, a query you run before events, or simply a line printed on the card. If a benefit can’t be tracked, either drop it or accept that it runs on trust.
Pricing and the tax-deductible portion
For supporter levels, the fair market value of benefits affects what portion of the payment is deductible. Work this out with your finance team before you set prices, and confirm how your Altru configuration records the split so acknowledgments come out right. This is worth testing on a few sample transactions before launch.
Restructuring an existing program
If you already have eleven levels and want five, plan the move rather than editing in place:
- Map old to new. Write down which current level each member will renew into, and what happens to anyone whose benefits get smaller.
- Retire levels, don’t delete them. Historical memberships still point at the old levels. Stop selling them on web forms and at the desk, but keep the records intact so reports and membership history stay accurate.
- Change at renewal. Moving members as they renew is far less disruptive than converting everyone on one date.
- Update every touchpoint at once. Web forms, renewal letters and emails, desk scripts, signage, and the website membership page should all describe the same levels on the same day.
- Test in a sandbox if you have one. Run a new join, a renewal, an upgrade, and a lapsed rejoin through each new level and check the dates, prices, and revenue posting. If you’re unsure whether a specific behavior is supported, Blackbaud support can confirm before you go live.
Reporting you’ll want later
Build your structure with the questions leadership will ask in mind: member count by level, retention by level, upgrade and downgrade rates, and revenue per member. Consistent level names and a clean program setup make those queries simple. Levels named for a one-time campaign (“Spring 2024 Family Special”) make them painful for years.
Quick answers
How many levels should we have?
Enough that every common household type has an obvious fit, and few enough that a new seasonal employee can recite them. For most sites that lands somewhere around five to seven.
Should we offer monthly payments?
Possibly, but check how your Altru setup and payment processing handle installments or recurring billing before promising it. It changes how renewals and lapses work, so test it end to end first.
