Short answer: not inside Altru itself. Altru is a ticketing, membership, fundraising, and CRM platform. As far as we know, it has no feature that draws a boundary around a location and triggers an ad, notification, or message when a phone crosses it. If you’ve heard otherwise, ask Blackbaud support directly, because product capabilities change and we’d rather you confirm than take our word for it.
That doesn’t mean geofencing and Altru can’t work together. Geofencing lives in your advertising tools. Altru’s job is to tell you where to draw the fences, who to leave out, and whether the campaign actually sold tickets or memberships. Used that way, Altru makes geofencing a lot smarter than a guess on a map.
Where geofencing actually happens
“Geofencing” covers a few different things, and it helps to know which one you mean before you talk to a vendor:
- Location-targeted ads. Google Ads, Meta, and most programmatic ad platforms let you show ads to people within a radius of an address or inside a drawn area. This is what most cultural organizations mean by geofencing, and it’s the easiest to start with.
- Geofence audiences from agencies. Some digital agencies and ad vendors capture devices seen at a location (a competing attraction, a convention center, a hotel district) and then serve ads to those devices for days or weeks afterward. This costs more and raises more privacy questions, so ask exactly how the data is sourced.
- App-based push notifications. If your organization has its own mobile app, the app can send a message when a visitor arrives on site or nears a specific exhibit. That requires an app with location permission granted by the user. Altru doesn’t provide this.
All three run outside Altru. The question worth answering is how to connect them to the data you already have.
Use Altru to decide where to draw the fence
The weakest geofence campaigns pick a radius around the building and hope. Your Altru data can do better.
- Map where buyers actually come from. Run a query on constituents with ticket or membership revenue in the last year and pull their postal codes. Group by ZIP. You’ll usually find a handful of areas that over-perform and some nearby neighborhoods that barely show up. Both are useful: one tells you where to reinforce, the other where you have room to grow.
- Separate members from single-ticket buyers. Members and day visitors often cluster in different places. A membership acquisition campaign might target the ZIPs where you sell lots of single tickets but few memberships.
- Look at group sales. Schools, camps, and tour operators that book groups tell you which districts and regions already know you. That can shape seasonal fences around school areas or tourist corridors.
- Think about visitor hubs, not just neighborhoods. Hotels, transit stations, and nearby attractions are common fence targets for tourist-heavy institutions. Altru won’t tell you hotel traffic, but if your sales show a lot of out-of-region buyers, that’s a signal these fences are worth testing.
Use Altru to decide who not to target
Paying to show “Become a member” ads to current members is a common waste. Most ad platforms accept customer lists for exclusion (or for lookalike audiences), usually uploaded as hashed email addresses.
Build a query of active members, export the email addresses, and upload them as an exclusion list in your ad platform. Refresh it on a regular schedule so recent joiners drop out of acquisition ads. Before you upload anything, check your privacy policy and any consent language on your forms to make sure this use is covered. If you’re unsure, ask whoever owns privacy and legal questions at your organization.
Clean data matters here. Duplicate constituent records and stale emails make exclusion lists leaky, so a quick look for duplicates before your first upload is time well spent.
Use Altru to measure whether it worked
Ad platforms will report impressions and clicks. They can’t tell you how many of those clicks turned into a membership recorded in Altru unless you set up a way to connect them. A few practical options:
- Dedicated landing pages. Point geofence ads at a page used only for that campaign, linking to your online ticket or membership purchase. Sales that start there are easier to separate.
- Campaign-specific discounts or promo codes. A code that only appears in the geofenced ad shows up on the transaction in Altru, so you can report on it later.
- Appeals or source coding. If your team already tracks marketing sources on revenue, add one for each geofence campaign so reporting stays consistent with your other efforts.
- Before-and-after ZIP comparisons. Rerun your postal code query after the campaign and compare the targeted areas against similar areas you didn’t target. It’s not perfect attribution, but it’s honest and uses data you trust.
Whether ad-platform conversion tracking (pixels or tags) can fire on your Altru-hosted web forms depends on how your forms are set up and what Blackbaud permits on those pages. Test it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before you build a campaign around it.
A sensible first test
Keep the first campaign small. Pick two or three high-potential ZIP codes from your Altru data, run location-targeted ads with a single landing page and a unique promo code, exclude current members, and run it for a few weeks. Then check Altru for redemptions and compare against the cost. That gives you a real answer about whether geofencing pays for your organization before you sign a larger agency contract.
Quick answers
Can Altru send a push notification when a member arrives on site?
Not on its own, as far as we know. That needs a mobile app with location permission. Confirm with Blackbaud if this matters to you.
Can I upload Altru constituents straight into an ad platform?
Not through a built-in connection that we’re aware of. The usual route is exporting a query result and uploading it to the ad platform, after checking your consent and privacy obligations.
