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Blackbaud Altru is a cloud-based all-in-one cultural organization management solution that includes tools to manage ticketing for events and programs, cultivate a membership and donor database, run a point of sale system in person and online, and more. Designed specifically for art and historical museums, zoos, aquariums, gardens, and science centers, Blackbaud Altru provides a 360-degree view of your visitors, members, and donors.
Provider
Blackbaud
Located In
United States
Foundation
1981
Open API
Unverified
Deployment
Cloud, SaaS, Web-Based
Training
Live Online, In Person, Documentation, Webinars
Support
FAQs/Forum, Phone Support, Email/Help Desk, Chat, Knowledge Base
Cloud-based solution that allows museums, educational institutions and non-profit organizations manage client memberships, ticketing operations, incoming visitors and fundraising campaigns.
Content Source: Blackbaud Altru
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Blackbaud Altru Reviews
Pros
Love it, helps us keep track of all of our constituents. We love how we can keep track of events, like who attended and also able to check them in.
Altru has a wonderful feature of copying appointments and holding them for you to reschedule. I love how there is a database of clients and you can easily search for them.
I also think the customer service is wonderful and always available - which is great. I also really appreciate that the system is very intuitive.
Because the Altru community is very responsive and the fact that the developers listen to the client's concerns, I am confident that Altru will become greater than it is now.
Cons
Another flaw is that sales orders will sometimes glitch and get sent to "unresolved sales orders" with no notification, and unless checked regularly can be overlooked.
Altru is not intuitive to use, and was very intimidating for my team.
When pulling results, it only pulls primary information and if the information is not loaded correctly, it can be a problem.
My larger frustration is that Blackbaud's teams didn't seem to communicate with each other or take lessons learned when building different products.
Most Recent Video User Review for Blackbaud Altru
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Only if you like to spend your money for nothing
Sarah N.
"A complete non-profit fundraising and ticketing tool"
Overall: Initially, we saved tens of thousands of dollars migrating our POS, CRM, and online ticketing platforms to the single Altru platform. We've never regretted it. That was about seven years ago, and we're still happily using it. Altru generally does everything we want it to do. It's great for admissions and event ticketing but not a great tool for email marketing or running a gift shop, though it does send bulk emails and allows you to sell merchandise. If you have an email marketing tool or gift shop software, keep it.
Pros: All our donor, patron, and visitor information is in one place, secure in the cloud. We rely on Altru to keep all our sales, donor, and member records together so we can see all the ways our constituents connect with us. This also makes reporting much easier, having all earned and contributed revenue recorded in one database. This also makes training easier, as there's only one system that many of our staff need to learn and interact with, everyone from ticket sellers to fundraisers. Finally, using one cloud-based system requires fewer administrators and no server hardware, streamlining staff and IT costs.
Cons: The financial and revenue setup can be intimidating, since there's a general ledger behind all the sales and revenue transactions. A general ledger must be set up, fiscal years created, transactions mapped, payment types created, payment methods created, etc. It can be daunting without a background in accounting or bookkeeping. You will need a trained financial professional to help oversee the financial configuration. Blackbaud will help you set this up initially, but you will need someone knowledgeable to oversee those parts.
"That 360 Degree View"
Overall: While there are several things that I would like to see improved in Altru, I still believe it is still the best product out there for non-seated venues that need a ticketing solution. Our reporting has gotten so much better because we *can* see what members, donors, volunteers, etc have done with our institution. I find the support and ongoing education webinars that Blackbaud offers to be lacking and they need to improve their discovery process.
Pros: The absolute best part of Altru is that it offers a 360 degree view of our constituents. We can query on many different types of engagement with our institution to see who our donors are or how likely a member is to renew. For frontline staff, the user interface for ticketing is easy to use and very intuitive. Training staff is so much more pleasant with this software!
Cons: Group sales and group sales reporting are woefully underdeveloped (I will never understand why the entire group sales sales method was just left out of the Program Revenue report). Refunds and exchanges are also really terrible in the system. There is no room for human error and trying to offer customer service to our constituents often results in our institution looking bad because the system just won't let us help them in a timely/efficient manner.
"Great Solution for Fundraising Shops"
Overall: I think it's a solid Blackbaud product that allows fundraisers to get the job done, but is a little behind the times.
Pros: I think Blackbaud Altru is a very powerful database, and I love that it has a component to integrate memberships/ticketing information with fundraising donations.
Cons: There is a really high learning curve with this product, there are also many quirks to the system that don't allow for global changing.
"Altru by Blackbaud Review"
Overall: I know a good amount how to deal with things on Altru, but if something comes up that you don't know, it's not always self-explanatory how to get done what you need to get done. Sometimes you have click on quite a series of things that you would never things to click on to make something happen. That being said, it doesn't seem to glitch often, which is nice. Again, having all the needed resources right there in one software is a helpful.
Pros: I love the amount that you can do on Altru and that it can all be done in one place. Whether it's keeping our volunteers organized, scheduling tours, selling event tickets, etc., it can all be done right there in Altru.
Cons: There are multiple ways you can do everything. Rather than having one concise way to do each action, you have to search to find many not simple ways to do everything. Sometimes, screens look slightly different on different computers as well, even though they've all been updated. It's amazing how much you can do, but it would be so much easier if the methods used were more concise.
"Great Product"
Overall: Love it, helps us keep track of all of our constituents. We love how we can keep track of events, like who attended and also able to check them in.
Pros: Very powerful tool. It helps keep track of all donor files, events, groups. There is so much you can do. It pulls reports.
Cons: The courses with live teacher sometime take a while to do.
