You send out a membership renewal email, a donor clicks the button, and the address bar suddenly shows a long Blackbaud-hosted URL with nothing in it that looks like your organization’s name. Some people pay anyway. Some hesitate, because they’ve been told for years to check the address before typing in a card number. A few forward the email to your staff and ask whether it’s a scam.
That’s the real reason people want a custom URL for Altru web forms: trust, brand consistency, and links short enough to print. Below is what’s realistic, what tends to break, and which approach fits which situation.
What you can and can’t change
Altru web forms are hosted by Blackbaud, so the page itself lives on Blackbaud’s domain. You control the form content, the merchandise or membership levels it offers, and usually some styling. Running the form itself at an address like tickets.yourmuseum.org, with your domain showing in the address bar the whole way through payment, is a different matter.
We’re not aware of a supported way to do that natively, but Blackbaud’s hosting options do change. Before you plan around it, open a case with Blackbaud support and ask directly: “Can our Altru web forms be served under our own domain, with our own SSL certificate?” Get the answer in writing, because the rest of your plan depends on it.
Assuming the answer is no, you still have three good options and one bad one.
Option 1: A redirect from your own domain
This is the simplest fix and the one we’d do first. Create a short path on your website, such as yourmuseum.org/renew or yourmuseum.org/tickets, and have your web host or CMS send a 301 redirect to the Altru form.
What it solves:
- Printed materials and QR codes carry your domain, not a long hosted link.
- You can change the destination later. If you rebuild a form or Altru gives it a new address, you update one redirect instead of reprinting signage or hunting through old emails.
- Emails look cleaner, and the link a donor hovers over starts with your name.
What it doesn’t solve: once the redirect fires, the browser still shows the Blackbaud address. Visitors who check the URL on the payment page will still see a domain that isn’t yours. A redirect makes the link trustworthy. It doesn’t change where the form lives.
Tip: keep a simple spreadsheet of every redirect, where it points, and which campaign uses it. Short links pile up quickly, and nobody remembers what /gala2 was for.
Option 2: Put the form inside a page on your site
Some organizations place the form within a page on their own website so the surrounding header, navigation, and footer are theirs. If your Altru setup gives you embed code for a form, this is worth testing. If it doesn’t, don’t try to force it with a hand-built frame.
Test carefully before you go live:
- Mobile. Embedded forms often scroll awkwardly or get cut off on phones, and that’s where most ticket buyers are.
- Payment. Complete a real transaction and a refund. Some browsers restrict cookies and scripts inside embedded content, which can break the payment step without an obvious error.
- The confirmation step. Make sure the buyer sees a clear confirmation and that the order shows up correctly in Altru.
- The address bar. Your domain will show, but careful visitors may notice the form itself comes from somewhere else. That’s normal, and it’s still better than a bare hosted page.
The option to avoid: domain masking
Many domain registrars offer “forwarding with masking,” which loads another site inside a frame so your domain stays in the address bar. It’s tempting because it looks like exactly the thing you want. Don’t use it for anything that takes payment. Masked pages commonly run into certificate warnings, broken sessions, blocked cookies, and analytics that can’t see what happened. It also teaches visitors that a page can claim to be yours while running somewhere else, which is the habit you’re trying to protect against.
Option 3: A checkout that runs on your domain
If the address bar matters to you, for example because donors have pushed back or your board has raised concerns about phishing, the only full fix is a purchase flow that’s actually hosted on your domain and writes the results back into Altru. That’s a bigger change than a redirect, so first decide whether the problem justifies it.
That’s the gap Social Good Checkouts was built for. It’s a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets, memberships, and donations that replaces Altru web forms, supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, and writes the data back to Altru, so your reporting and constituent records stay where they are.
Picking the right approach
- Main goal is short, printable, change-proof links: use redirects. You can set them up this week.
- Main goal is keeping visitors inside your site’s look and navigation: test whether your forms can be embedded, and go with it only if mobile and payment testing pass.
- Main goal is your domain in the address bar during payment: confirm with Blackbaud whether that’s possible natively. If it isn’t, you’ll need a checkout hosted on your own domain.
Whichever you choose, add campaign tracking parameters to the links you send so you can see which emails and signs drive sales. Then compare completion rates before and after the change. That way you’ll know whether the change helped.
