How to Automate Blackbaud Altru

The same person buys a ticket and leaves a bequest

Blackbaud Altru is ticketing, membership and fundraising software for general admission cultural organisations: museums, zoos, aquariums, gardens, science centres and historic houses. Blackbaud built it around one specific problem, which is that these places run two businesses for a single audience.

The earned side sells admission, timed entry, group visits, memberships, facility rentals and events. The contributed side asks for donations, grants, sponsorship and eventually a legacy gift. In almost any other sector those would be separate departments with separate customers. In a museum they are the same family. A visitor who came twice with children, bought a membership in year two and gave at last spring's gala is one record, and the point of a system like Altru is that both halves of that record sit together.

Which is why the questions asked of it are joint ones. Not how many tickets sold, but which of those visitors became members, and which members are worth a conversation.

Every grant report asks for a number somebody has to go and find

A cultural organisation has more people to answer to than a business does, and each wants a different number in a different format.

A foundation funded the schools programme and wants attendance broken out by catchment, uploaded to its own submission portal, by month end. An arts council wants the annual return its way. A sponsor wants evidence its logo appeared. The board wants earned against contributed revenue for the quarter, and finance and ticketing disagree about where the month ended.

The day-to-day sits in other people's systems too. Tickets sold through a discount site or a city pass get redeemed at the door and settled on that partner's extranet. The card processor's payouts have to be matched against the till. A school booking waits on a district's purchase order. A wedding enquiry for the atrium arrived by email and sits in somebody's inbox. Reviews accumulate on sites nobody records.

Every one of those is somebody opening a browser instead of the job they were hired for.

Blackbaud Altru

The gate reconciled by morning Yesterday's admissions set against what the card processor settled and what reached the bank, with the difference named the same day.

Grant deadlines that do not creep up Each funder's own portal read for what is due and when, with the attendance and programme figures gathered before the writing starts.

Partner redemptions accounted for Discount and city-pass sales pulled from each partner's extranet and matched against the door count, on your schedule rather than theirs.

Altru already joins earned revenue to contributed revenue

Inside its own walls Altru does the joined-up part properly, and that is not a small thing to have solved.

Ticketing handles online and on-site sales with member pricing, timed entry and group sales, so a Saturday can be capacity managed and a member still walks in free. Membership programmes track activity and revenue and turn first-time visitors into members. Fundraising sits in the same database, with online donation forms and Blackbaud's wealth capacity and philanthropic propensity data attached to constituent records, so a development officer can see which of last summer's visitors is worth a call. Group sales and facility rentals, resource allocation, special events, marketing and communications and online transactions are all there. Reporting runs across earned and contributed revenue together rather than in two silos, and point of sale ties the shop and the gate into the same ledger. Partner add-ons cover self-serve kiosks, digital membership cards and access control.

All of that works on transactions Altru processed itself. The foundation's grant portal did not go through Altru.

Neither did the reseller's extranet, the payment processor's settlements, the district's purchasing system or the review sites.

Reseller redemptions and grant deadlines can be collected overnight

Nothing on the reseller's extranet or the funder's portal is hidden. Read on a schedule, those pages turn the Monday development meeting into a briefing rather than a scramble.

Yesterday's admissions from Altru set against what the card processor actually settled and what reached the bank, with the difference named on the day rather than at month end. Redemptions pulled from each discount and city-pass partner's extranet and reconciled against the door count, because those partners report on their own schedule and in their own format.

Grant deadlines and reporting requirements read off each funder's own submission portal and ordered by which falls first, with the figures each one asks for gathered before the writing starts. Membership renewals and lapsed members surfaced with when they last visited and what they last gave. Group and school bookings checked against whether the purchase order arrived and the deposit cleared, so a coach full of children is never a Tuesday surprise. Facility rental enquiries collected from wherever they landed, and last week's reviews pulled together with anything under three stars on top.

Contact with a member or a donor stays supervised throughout. Anything that reaches a supporter is drafted and read by a person before it goes anywhere.

Fundraising should not begin with a login

Somebody in the development office is gathering all of that now, usually the day before it is due, usually at the cost of the calls they meant to make.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as your staff are. It opens the funder's portal, the reseller extranet, the payment processor or the review sites, reads what is there, and leaves one summary with the deadlines and the differences called out.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it mid-way. Nothing reaches a member or a donor without a person reading it first.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.