Item: Blackbaud Altru
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our museum uses Altru for all of our daily admission and 3D movie tickets, as well as advance sales and registration for museum programs, workshops, and events. We also use it for all of our group sales (including rentals, docent-guided tours, education programs, and community outreach programs), donations, memberships, and patron/prospect relationship management. About 70% of employees at the museum use Altru for their job. It has generally allowed us to centralize our revenue streams and have a clear picture of every patron's interaction with our organization.

Pros and Cons

Development - prospect management, memberships, donations
Visitor Services - ticket sales for programs/special events
Marketing - communications, web form management

Web Management - no online portal for site "registrants," little customization, and no group sales
Group Sales Management - unable to change orders after complete, not user friendly
Ticket Sales - not user friendly, restrictive, event check-in clunky

Return on Investment

Able to connect with about 7,000 constituents in marketing communications because we can have donations, tickets, memberships, etc. all in one database

Alternatives Considered

We switched from Raisers Edge in 2012 due to the need to have all processes in one database. Group Sales/Rentals had to use a separate database for their sales than the Members and Donors department. We also could not sell tickets for events and programs in one space. Being able to have all of these in one database is why we chose Altru.

Support Rating

Blackbaud Support is available for any questions/concerns. They have a chat support system, a Knowledgebase portal with how-to articles and videos, a networking community to ask questions and talk about processes and specific products with other Blackbaud users, etc.

Key Insights

Do you think Blackbaud Altru delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Blackbaud Altru's feature set?

Yes

Did Blackbaud Altru live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Blackbaud Altru go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Blackbaud Altru again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Lightspeed Retail

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited for smaller organizations that want to centralize many systems. Smaller organizations will have less constituents to manage and fewer events (our organization has 100,000+ constituents, daily programs/events, and a large donor base). Many areas within Altru are not updated to be functional for 2020. Because of this, we do not use the merchandising feature, the volunteer portal, or marketing communications.

It does a little bit of everything "okay enough" to be better than having separate systems. It's restrictive in many areas, but being able to do SO much in one database outweighs the negatives! It is 100% necessary to have a data manager who spends all of their time in Altru doing data cleanup, researching and writing policies and procedures, training new users, keeping staff up-to-date on new processes, creating queries and running reports, creating workarounds for "unfixable" issues within the database.

Daily Admission
Membership
Donors/Donations
Education Programs
Group Tours
Movie Tickets
Programs/Special Events
Facility Rentals

Innovative Uses

Facility Rentals - using the Group Sales feature to book locations of the museum for specific guests
Education programs - creating programs offered by the education department and booking them in group sales for specific schools (use program categories and group types to help maintain data cleanliness
Data analysis - using query/oData to view ticket purchases and create dashboards of attendance data

Altru does everything "well enough" to keep around.

Overall Satisfaction with Altru