Zoo fundraising doesn’t look like a typical nonprofit’s. A large share of gifts are small and impulsive: a family adds five dollars to their admission for the conservation fund, a kid’s grandparent buys an animal adoption for a birthday, someone gives in memory of a keeper after reading a story on social media. Mixed in with those are the larger annual fund and capital gifts your development staff work on for months.
When you already run admissions and membership in Blackbaud Altru, the question usually isn’t “what donor database should we buy?” It’s “how do we take more of these gifts online, on phones, without creating a second set of donor records we have to reconcile?” This page is meant to help you answer that.
Start with the kinds of gifts you actually take
Before comparing tools, list your giving channels and roughly how each one comes in today. For most zoos and aquariums the list looks something like this:
- Add-on gifts at admission or membership purchase (round-ups, conservation donations)
- Animal adoptions, often with a packet, certificate, or plush that has to be fulfilled
- Tribute and memorial gifts, which need the honoree and a notification address
- Annual fund and year-end appeals driven by email and mail
- Event-related giving such as paddle raises or sponsorships
- Restricted funds for specific species, habitats, or field conservation partners
Each one has different data needs. An adoption needs the recipient’s name and shipping details. A tribute gift needs the honoree. A restricted gift needs the right designation so finance doesn’t have to recode it later. A donation tool that handles only a generic “amount” field will push that detail into notes fields or spreadsheets, and someone ends up retyping it.
What “works with Altru” should mean
Plenty of online giving platforms say they integrate with Blackbaud. For an Altru shop, ask specifically how each of these is handled:
Where the gift lands
Does the gift post into Altru as revenue on the donor’s constituent record, with the correct designation, or does it arrive as a file someone imports? Imports are workable, but they create a lag and a recurring task. If a vendor says “sync,” ask how often and who resolves errors.
How donors are matched
Zoos see the same household buy tickets, renew a membership, and give, sometimes with different email addresses. Ask how the tool decides whether an online donor is an existing constituent or a new one. Weak matching is one of the fastest ways to fill Altru with duplicates.
Tribute, adoption, and custom fields
Confirm the tool can capture the extra information your gift types need and that it ends up somewhere useful in Altru, not just in the vendor’s own dashboard.
Acknowledgments
Decide who sends the receipt: the giving tool, Altru, or your email platform. Two receipts confuse donors; none is worse. If adoptions include goods, have your finance team confirm the receipt wording for the deductible portion.
Altru’s own donation forms
Altru includes web forms for online donations, and for some organizations they’re enough. Before buying anything, build a test gift in your current form on a phone and walk through it the way a visitor would. Check how it looks on a small screen, whether it supports the gift types above, and whether the payment options match what your visitors expect. If you’re unsure whether a specific option (a particular wallet payment, a custom question, a recurring schedule) is available in your Altru setup, ask Blackbaud support or test it in a sandbox rather than assuming either way.
The honest comparison is between that test and what a replacement would give you, measured against the gift list you made at the top.
Features that tend to matter most at a zoo
- Mobile-first checkout. Impulse gifts happen on phones, often while someone is standing in front of an exhibit sign with a QR code.
- Apple Pay and Google Pay. Fewer typed fields make small gifts much easier to finish on a phone.
- Giving inside other purchases. A donation prompt in the ticket or membership cart reaches visitors who would never go looking for a standalone donate page.
- Fee coverage. Giving donors the option to cover the card processing fee helps more of each gift reach the fund it was meant for.
- Your branding. A page that looks like your zoo, not a generic form, reassures donors they’re in the right place.
A short evaluation checklist
- Make a test gift of each type and look at the resulting record in Altru. Is everything there, coded correctly?
- Make a gift as an existing member using a different email. Did it match or create a duplicate?
- Ask who handles refunds and how they reach Altru.
- Ask what happens to gifts if the connection to Altru is down for an hour.
- Have finance review how deposits and batches reconcile.
Where Social Good Checkouts fits
Our Checkouts product is a branded, mobile-friendly checkout that replaces Altru webforms for donations as well as tickets and memberships. It supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, can offer donors the option to cover the card fee, and writes the data back to Altru, so your development team keeps working in Altru as they do today.
Quick answers
Do we need a separate donor database alongside Altru?
Usually not. Altru already holds constituents, memberships, and revenue. Adding a second database tends to create reconciliation work unless you have a specific reason for it.
Should donations live on their own page or inside ticket checkout?
Both. A dedicated page serves appeals and tributes; an in-cart prompt catches visitors who weren’t planning to give.
