Your education coordinator lives in Outlook. Your facilities lead lives in Google Calendar. The school tours, private rentals, and evening programs all live in Altru. Sooner or later someone asks, “Can’t we just get the Altru schedule into my calendar?” The short answer is yes, but probably as an export you refresh rather than a true live sync. Below: how to set that up so it stays useful, and how to decide whether you need a sync at all.
First, be clear about which calendar you mean
“Our calendar” usually means one of two very different things, and the right approach depends on which one:
- The internal operations calendar. Staff need to see what’s booked: group visits, room and space reservations, program sessions, event setups. Accuracy matters, and the audience is a few dozen people at most.
- The public calendar. Visitors need to see what they can attend and buy tickets for. Here the issue isn’t Outlook at all; it’s getting availability onto your website.
Most of the frustration comes from trying to solve the second problem with the first tool, or the other way around. The rest of this article deals mostly with the internal calendar; the public one is covered near the end.
Does Altru sync to Outlook or Google Calendar on its own?
We’re not aware of a built-in, two-way sync between Altru’s scheduling data and Outlook or Google Calendar, and we wouldn’t plan around one. Altru’s options and integrations change over time, so if this matters to you, confirm with Blackbaud support or check the current documentation before building a workaround. Ask specifically whether there’s a calendar feed (an iCal or .ics subscription URL) for events or program schedules. If there is, that’s your simplest route. If not, the export approach below works with what every Altru database already has: queries.
The export approach: query, clean up, import
Outlook and Google Calendar both accept a CSV file with one row per event. Altru queries can produce exactly that. The steps:
- Build a query of the events you care about. Use the event or program fields that matter to staff: name, start date and time, end date and time, location, and a short description or capacity note. Filter to a reasonable window, such as the next 60 or 90 days, so the file stays manageable.
- Name your output columns to match the calendar’s import format. Google Calendar expects headers like Subject, Start Date, Start Time, End Date, End Time, Description, and Location. Classic desktop Outlook can import a CSV and lets you map columns during the import; newer and web versions of Outlook may handle CSV differently or not at all, so test with your version first. Renaming the query output columns up front saves you from editing headers every time.
- Export to CSV and check the date and time formats. This is where most imports fail. Open the file and make sure dates and times look like plain values, not combined date-time stamps the calendar can’t parse. A one-line spreadsheet formula to split them is fine if you need it.
- Import into a dedicated calendar, never someone’s personal one. Create a shared calendar called something like “Altru Schedule” and import there. When you refresh, you can delete and re-import that calendar without touching anyone’s own appointments.
Don’t drop the location
Locations are the field people most often lose. If the event’s location or room lives on a related record rather than the event itself, the query has to pull it in explicitly, and the column has to be labeled Location for the calendar to place it correctly. If it lands in the description instead, staff can still read it, but they won’t see it at a glance or get map links in Google Calendar. Test with five events before exporting five hundred.
Keeping it current
A CSV import is a snapshot. The moment someone reschedules a tour in Altru, the Outlook copy is wrong. You have a few options, from least to most effort:
- Scheduled refresh. One person re-runs the query and re-imports weekly, wiping the shared calendar first. Put a note in the calendar’s description saying when it was last updated so nobody treats it as live.
- Short window, frequent refresh. Export only the next two weeks and refresh more often. Smaller files, fewer stale events.
- A Google Sheet as the middle layer. If your query results are already flowing to a Google Sheet, your IT staff or a technically comfortable admin can write a small script that turns rows into calendar events. That’s a do-it-yourself build, and someone has to own it when it breaks.
Whatever you pick, set the expectation clearly: Altru is the source of truth, and the Outlook or Google copy is for visibility only. Changes made in the calendar app won’t flow back, so staff should never reschedule there.
When you don’t need a sync at all
Sometimes the real need is narrower than it sounds. If one coordinator wants to see tomorrow’s group visits, a saved Altru query or report they can open each morning may do the job with no export. If leadership wants a weekly look-ahead, an emailed report may beat a calendar. A sync is worth the upkeep when many people need the schedule inside the tool they already use all day.
The public calendar is a different problem
If the goal is showing visitors what’s coming up and what has tickets left, exporting to Google Calendar and embedding it on your site tends to disappoint. It can’t show real-time availability, it goes stale between refreshes, and it doesn’t lead anyone to a purchase. That’s the gap our Calendar Builder covers: an embeddable timed-ticketing calendar for your website that reads availability from Altru in real time, so the public view stays accurate without anyone re-exporting.
Quick answers
Will edits in Outlook or Google Calendar update Altru?
Not with an export-and-import setup. The calendar copy is read-only in practice; make changes in Altru and refresh.
Can I subscribe to the Altru schedule instead of importing?
Only if your Altru setup provides a calendar feed URL. Confirm with Blackbaud support. Even with a subscription, Google and Outlook decide how often to refresh it, which can be hours behind.
