Item: Blackbaud Altru
Rating: 8
Author: Gillian Armstrong

Overall Satisfaction with Altru

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our entire organization (children's museum) uses Altru to help manage daily sales, group sales, memberships, fundraising, merchandise sales in the museum store, and events/programs. We've been using the program for just under a year and have had success in keeping track of nearly every department of the museum.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Combines multiple departments' data under "one roof".
Interface is relatively easy to learn for basic tasks (e.g. daily sales) and query can be used for more complex interests.
Support team is very knowledgeable and readily available; the Altru Community is full of other users who can also help you through your specific question or issue.

Cons

We'd love to see more reports available. I initially spent a lot of time building queries to get the information we needed, and we often use queries for regular reporting.
We do not use Altru for volunteer management because of its limited functionality.
We've run into some software issues not limited to our organization, but these have been resolved in a timely manner.

Return on Investment

We've moved from two different software programs to just using Altru.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's worked well for our newly-expanded museum over the past year. We've got a growing membership program (~12,000 members) and our highest visitation and we can find that information we need for reporting from the reports and queries. For the most part, we've been satisfied with what Altru has to offer. For the areas we find lacking, support offers a page where you can contribute an idea for improvement to be voted on, and we have seen some of these implemented in the update releases which are scheduled every 45-90 days. We are only in our first year of use, but I think down the road we will have the majority of our needs figured out.

Comments

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First year of use at children's museum