Scheduled programs are easy to count in Altru: there’s an event, it has a time and a capacity, and you can see who bought a seat. Daily admission is looser by design. A ticket is good for a date, not a time slot, so there’s no event record collecting attendees the way a tour or a class does. When the board asks “how many people came through the gate last Saturday,” the answer depends on decisions you made, often years ago, about how admission gets rung up.
This piece covers what Altru actually gives you for daily admission, where the gaps are, and how to set things up so your attendance numbers mean something.
Sold is not the same as attended
The first thing to settle internally is which number you’re reporting. For daily admission, Altru reliably knows how many tickets were sold for a program on a given date, through daily sales at the desk, advance sales, group sales, and your web forms. That’s the figure most organizations end up calling attendance.
Whether you also know how many tickets were used depends on whether you scan or otherwise redeem tickets at entry, and on how that redemption is recorded in your database. Walk-up sales are close to a one-to-one match with visits. Advance and online sales are not: some people never show, and some show on a different day than the one they booked. If your share of online sales has grown, the gap between sold and attended has probably grown with it.
If you aren’t sure whether your setup records redemption in a way you can query, test it in your sandbox: sell a ticket, redeem it the way your gate staff do, and look for the change on the order or ticket. Blackbaud support can confirm what is and isn’t stored for your configuration.
Make sure everyone who walks in gets a ticket
Most attendance undercounts come from people who never touch the register. The usual culprits:
- Members. If members just flash a card and walk past, they aren’t in your admission numbers at all. Ring them through with a $0 member price type so each visit creates a ticket.
- Free categories. Children under a certain age, reciprocal visitors, free-day guests, and staff guests should each have their own $0 price type rather than being waved in.
- Comps and passes. Donated passes, partner vouchers, and complimentary tickets should be redeemed as tickets, not counted on a clipboard.
- Groups. School and tour groups booked through group sales should be tied to the same daily admission program, with the chaperone and student counts entered as tickets, so they roll up with everyone else.
This is mostly a desk-training issue. A short list taped next to each station (“every person who enters gets a ticket, even free”) does more than any report.
Use price types to answer the questions people actually ask
Once every entry is a ticket, price types become your attendance breakdown. Adult, child, senior, member adult, member child, school group, reciprocal, free day: each one is a category you can count by date. Resist the urge to collapse them. A single “Free” price type tells you nothing when someone asks how many visits came from members versus community access programs.
Keep the list short enough that cashiers pick the right one under pressure, and review it once a year. Retired price types should be marked inactive rather than reused for something new, so historical counts stay comparable.
Decide how many daily admission programs you need
Some sites run one general admission program. Others split by entrance, by building, or by add-on experience (a special exhibition that requires general admission plus an extra ticket). The more programs you have, the more careful you need to be about double counting: a guest who buys general admission plus an exhibit ticket is one visitor and two tickets. Write down which program counts as the “gate” number and report attendance from that one only; treat the others as participation in an experience.
Build the attendance query once
Rather than pulling a different report every month, build a saved query against your ticket or sales data that returns:
- The program (filtered to your gate program).
- The date the ticket is valid for, not the date it was purchased. This is the detail that trips people up most often, since advance sales are bought weeks before the visit.
- Price type, so you can group by category.
- Sales channel, if you want to compare walk-up, online, and group.
- Exclusions for refunded or voided tickets.
Run it against a day you know well, a day where someone did a manual headcount or where you remember the numbers, and check that it lands close. If it’s off, the gap usually points to a group of people who aren’t getting tickets or a program that’s being counted twice. Altru’s standard reports may already cover part of this; compare their totals to your query before you trust either one.
Reconcile occasionally with a physical count
Even with good habits, ticket counts drift from reality. A couple of times a year, do a manual clicker count at the main entrance for a full day and compare it to your query. You’re not trying to match exactly. You’re checking that the difference is small and stable, so you can explain it if someone asks. If you can’t scan at the gate, this check is the only real evidence you have that ticket sales track actual visits.
Quick answers
Can I set a capacity on a daily admission program?
Daily admission is built around a date rather than timed slots, which is why many sites that need capacity limits move to timed entry using scheduled programs. Check your configuration in a sandbox before switching, since it changes how desk staff sell.
Should member visits count toward attendance?
Almost always, yes. Funders and boards care about people through the door, and member visits are also how you measure whether members use their benefits. Just keep them on their own price types so you can report them separately.
