Zoo memberships don’t work like museum memberships. A typical zoo member is a household with two adults, a few kids, maybe a grandparent or a nanny who brings the children on weekdays. They visit often, mostly in warm months, and a lot of them tend to arrive at once when the weather first turns nice. Whatever tools you add around Altru have to handle that pattern, not a generic “donor with a card” pattern.
This page is for zoo membership and admissions teams who are keeping Altru and want to know what to look for in membership software that works alongside it.
Start with what Altru already does well
Before shopping, be clear about what stays in Altru. Membership programs, levels, pricing, households, constituent records, renewals, revenue, and reporting all live there. Any add-on you buy should read from and write back to those records, not keep a second membership list that someone has to reconcile every month.
That rules out a lot of standalone membership platforms. If a vendor’s answer to “where does the membership record live?” is “in our system, and we export to Altru,” expect duplicate constituents, mismatched expiration dates, and a staff member whose job slowly becomes import cleanup.
Where zoos usually feel the gaps
Household members and named cardholders
Zoo levels are often defined by who can come in: two named adults plus children, an add-on caregiver, a set number of guest passes. Members change those details constantly. A new baby, a new caregiver, a change of address. If every one of those changes is a phone call or email to your membership office, that’s a staffing cost you can measure. Look for tools that let members see and update their own details while the data stays in Altru.
Renewals and upgrades
At many zoos, renewals bunch up in spring and early summer. Members want to renew from their phone, see what level they have, and upgrade from an individual to a family level without calling. Ask any vendor exactly how an online renewal or upgrade is recorded in Altru, and test it with a lapsed membership, an early renewal, and an upgrade mid-term. Those three cases are where date and pricing mistakes show up.
Proof of membership at the gate
Members lose physical cards, forget them in the other car, or never received one. Your gate staff need a fast way to confirm status. Mobile wallet cards and handheld scanning help here, but only if they’re checking live Altru status rather than a list exported last week.
Lapsed members who still think they’re members
A family that joined two summers ago may honestly not know their membership expired. Those conversations at the gate are awkward and slow the line. The fix is mostly visibility: members should be able to look up their own expiration date before they drive out.
Questions to ask any vendor
- Does it write membership transactions back to Altru, and how? Ask to see the resulting record in Altru, not a diagram.
- How does it match people to existing constituents? Find out what happens when a member renews with a new email address. If the answer is “it creates a new record,” plan for duplicates.
- Does it reflect your program rules? Renewal windows, lapse handling, and level pricing should come from how you’ve set up Altru, not be rebuilt in a separate tool.
- Can members handle household changes themselves? And does that update the Altru household, or just send your staff a notification to do it by hand?
- What happens when Altru is slow or unavailable? Every integration has an answer to this. Make sure you hear it before your spring rush, not during it.
- Who supports it? When something posts wrong, you need someone who understands both the tool and Altru.
Test before you commit
Run a short pilot with real scenarios from your own membership office. Pull ten recent support emails, the “I can’t log in,” “I want to add my mother-in-law,” “I renewed but my card says expired” type, and walk each one through the tool. If you have an Altru sandbox or test environment, use it. If you’re unsure how a specific Altru behavior will interact with an add-on (for example, how your renewal window treats a late online payment), confirm it with the vendor in writing or check with Blackbaud support rather than assuming.
Also check the boring parts: how the tool handles refunds, whether your finance team can reconcile its payments to Altru batches, and whether reports you already run still show online renewals the way you expect.
How Social Good fits
Social Good builds tools that sit alongside Altru rather than replacing it. Our Membership Portal lets members view their status, renew, upgrade, and update their profile online against live Altru data, so the membership record stays in Altru and your office spends less time answering “am I still a member?” questions.
Quick answers
Do we need to leave Altru to get better zoo membership tools?
Not necessarily. Much of the day-to-day friction sits in member self-service and gate check-in, and those can often be handled with tools that connect to Altru.
What’s the biggest risk with a membership add-on?
A second membership database. If the tool keeps its own records and syncs later, expect duplicates and date mismatches.
