Collecting health information through your ticketing forms sounds simple: add a question, save the answer, done. In practice, Altru’s web forms aren’t built as general-purpose survey tools, and health data is the kind of information you want to hold as little of, for as short a time as possible. Before you change anything, it helps to split the question in two. Contact tracing and vaccine status are different problems, and Altru handles them differently.
Contact tracing: you may already have most of what you need
Contact tracing comes down to one question: who was on site during a given window, and how do we reach them? If you sell timed or dated admission online, Altru already records much of that without any new form fields.
- Advance sales are tied to a constituent record, so you have the purchaser’s name, email, and usually a phone number, plus the date and time slot they bought.
- Membership visits scanned or looked up at the desk connect a visit to a known member record.
- Group sales have an organizer contact attached to the reservation.
A query on sales for a specific date and time slot, returning the purchaser’s contact fields, gives you a call or email list in minutes. Build and save that query now, test it against a past date, and you won’t be assembling it under pressure later.
Where the gaps are
Be honest with yourself about what this data doesn’t cover:
- Only the buyer is recorded. One person buying six tickets gives you one contact, not six. For most outreach that’s enough, since the buyer can tell their party, but it isn’t a full guest list.
- Walk-up daily sales are often anonymous unless your desk captures a name and email at the register.
- Arrival time isn’t the same as presence. A 10:00 ticket tells you when someone was expected, not how long they stayed or which galleries they were in.
If your health authority asks for more than the buyer’s contact information, closing those gaps usually means a process change (asking walk-ups for an email at the desk, for example) rather than a new web form field.
Vaccine or health status: think hard before storing it
This is where the instinct to “just add a field” gets risky. Vaccination and health screening answers are sensitive personal information. Once they sit on constituent records in your CRM, they show up in queries, exports, and backups, and they’re visible to anyone with access to those records. Depending on your location and the type of data, there may be legal requirements around how you collect, store, and delete it. Talk to whoever handles privacy or legal questions for your organization before you collect anything.
For most organizations, the cleanest options look like this:
- Attestation, not records. Add clear language to the purchase flow and confirmation email: “By completing this purchase, you confirm that everyone in your party meets our current entry requirements.” You keep no health data at all.
- Visual check at the door. If proof is required, staff look at a card or app at entry and wave the guest through. Nothing is written into Altru.
- A separate, temporary form. If you truly need to collect answers, use a standalone form tool outside Altru, link it from the confirmation email, restrict who can see responses, and set a calendar reminder to delete them when your retention period ends.
Each of these keeps your constituent records clean, which matters long after any particular health rule has been lifted.
Can you add custom questions to Altru web forms at all?
This depends on the form type and your version, and it’s worth confirming rather than assuming. Some Altru web forms allow additional fields or attributes; others are fairly fixed in what they collect. Before planning around a custom question:
- Check the configuration options for the specific web form you use (ticketing, membership, donation, and so on) in a test or sandbox environment if you have one.
- Confirm where the answer actually lands. A value saved as a constituent attribute behaves very differently from a note on the order, and you need to know which one before you can report on it or delete it.
- Ask Blackbaud support whether the field you have in mind is supported on that form, and how it can be removed later.
Pay attention to the “remove it later” part. A temporary screening question that writes to hundreds of constituent records is easy to add and tedious to clean up. If you do go this route, plan the cleanup (a query that finds every record with that attribute, plus a batch update or delete) before the first answer comes in.
A sensible setup if requirements come back
Public health rules change, and you don’t want to design this from scratch the next time. A low-effort setup to keep on file:
- A saved query listing purchasers and contact details by visit date and time slot.
- Prepared attestation text for the purchase page and confirmation email, ready to switch on.
- A one-page desk procedure: what staff check at entry, what they say to guests who don’t meet requirements, and that nothing gets typed into Altru.
- A named owner for any health data collected outside Altru, with a deletion date.
Quick answers
Should vaccine status go on the constituent record?
Generally no. It’s sensitive, hard to purge completely once it’s spread through queries and exports, and rarely needed after the visit. Attestation or a visual check usually meets the requirement without storing anything.
Can I trace every person in a group, not just the buyer?
Not from standard ticket sales data alone. You’d need to collect each guest’s contact details separately, which adds friction and more personal data to manage. Most organizations contact the buyer and ask them to notify their party.
