How-to
Can Altru Accept PayPal? Options and Tradeoffs for Altru Organizations
Short version: as far as we know, Altru does not take PayPal at checkout. Online card payments in Altru go through Blackbaud’s own payment processing, and PayPal is not one of the options its web forms or point of sale present. Blackbaud’s payment features change over time, so if PayPal is important to your board
How Members Can Redeem Guest Passes Online in Altru
A family membership comes with four guest passes a year. The member wants to bring her sister’s kids on Saturday, and your Saturday tickets are timed and sell out online. She opens your website, picks a time slot, and finds no place to use the guest passes she already paid for. Her choices are to
How to Limit an Altru Discount to a Set Number of Uses per Day
Say you partner with a local library to offer 25 free or half-price admissions a day, or you run a “first 50 visitors” promotion on Tuesdays. The discount is easy to build in Altru. Stopping it at 25 or 50 is the hard part. This article covers what to expect from Altru’s discounts, a workaround
How to Filter the Altru Group Sales Revenue Report by Program and Future Dates
Two questions come up again and again with the group sales revenue report in Altru: “Can I see this for just one program?” and “Can I see what’s booked for next month?” The first matters to whoever manages school field trips separately from adult tours. The second matters to anyone forecasting staffing or cash flow.
How to Sell Scheduled Program Tickets as Gifts in Altru
Every November the calls start: “Can I buy my niece a spot in the spring nature camp as a holiday present?” or “My dad would love the behind-the-scenes tour, but I don’t know which date he can do.” It’s a great sale to make. The trouble is that a scheduled program in Altru is built
How to Query Time Fields in Altru: Workarounds That Hold Up
“How many tickets did we sell for the 10:00 entry slot last Saturday?” or “How much of our daily sales revenue came in after 4 p.m.?” sound like simple questions. Then you open an ad-hoc query in Altru, look for a time filter, and find that the field either isn’t there, doesn’t offer the comparisons
How to Delete Attributes or Notes in Bulk in Altru (Safely)
Every Altru database builds up leftovers. There’s an attribute category someone made for a 2019 gala, a “Mailing preference (old)” attribute nobody trusts anymore, or a few thousand notes from a data conversion that just say “imported.” At some point you want them gone. The trouble is that Altru works best one record at a
How to Customize Patron Search Results in Altru (and What to Do Instead)
A guest at the admissions desk says, “I’m a member, it’s under Johnson.” Staff type the name, get a list of a dozen Johnsons, and start asking for a street address, an email, a phone number, anything that would tell those rows apart. Behind the guest, the line gets longer. That moment is why so
Accepting Donations From People Who Can’t Attend Your Altru Event
Every gala invitation list has a group of people who love the cause and still can’t come. They’re out of town, they don’t do black-tie, or $250 a plate isn’t in the budget. Many of them would gladly give something. The question is whether your event setup in Altru gives them a clear way to
How to Send a One-Off Email to a Single Constituent in Altru
A member calls because their confirmation never arrived. A donor wants a copy of last year’s gift details. A teacher needs the parking instructions for a field trip on Thursday. Each of these comes down to one person and one email, and Altru doesn’t make that as obvious as you’d hope. Altru’s email tools are
