We use Altru across the whole organization. It has helped us with the client journey from their first visit through membership to the donor stage. Altru has helped remove silos and is a good platform for efficiency.
Pros
Point of sale - Ease of understanding by front staff.
Membership transactions - Ease of understanding by front staff.
Cons
Group sales - The process could be more streamlined.
Reporting - There is not one report that I can tie out to financials.
Likelihood to Recommend
Altru is well suited for nonprofit organizations with daily admissions and fundraising.
Altru is being used as our primary software for our organization. We manage daily sales, merchandise, memberships, and programming all through Altru. It manages all of these areas well and allows easy reporting and sharing of information. While we have different departments using it, the entire program fits our needs.
Pros
Manages Memberships
Inventory of Small Retail
Daily Sales
Cons
Online Group Sales
Likelihood to Recommend
For a small business looking for software that can manage multiple areas of your business, Altru is a great solution. It brings in many areas of a non-profit business into one software package.
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
Development - prospect management, memberships, donations
Visitor Services - ticket sales for programs/special events
Marketing - communications, web form management
Cons
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
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.
VU
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (51-200 employees)
Altru really is at its most powerful when it is used across an entire organization. I would not recommend being used piecemeal with other software solutions, as it defeats the purpose. If you can get everyone on the same page, it can be a good tool for 360 degree management of an organization.
Pros
Event and Program Management - It's easy to create events and program series and sell tickets online through online forms.
Annual Fund Donations - It's simple to create donation forms and gift processing is easy and fast with batch inputs.
Point of sale is clean and simple.
Cons
Custom querying features can be cumbersome to build and don't always give you the results you expect.
Online payments cannot always be re-designated, which can be difficult with high level donors and board members make pledge payments through an online form and then they cannot be re-designated to their pledge.
Multiple donor or membership programs can be difficult to manage.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you can implement across all departments, and you are confident in the cleanliness of the data you are importing into the system, Altru is a good system for you. You'd benefit from having a strong, internal IT staff member to help with the process, and spending the time and money on web form design.
We are a museum, venue, and nonprofit who uses Altru as our organization's POS system and customer relationship manager. At least half of our staff utilizes Altru on a regular basis for sales, membership tracking, or reporting. Altru tracks patron activity, allowing us to understand our customer's interests and better segment mailing lists for digital or print marketing. Altru also helps us manage membership at a higher level.
Pros
Ticketing and tracking many different types of admission sales including group, facility rental, individual tickets, and class registration.
Membership management, including membership card mailing, recurring memberships, and renewal reminders.
Being an all-encompassing database rather than forcing you to use multiple databases.
Great customer service and client support, including ongoing updates to better the system.
Has a merchandise inventory management system.
Cons
Could use more reporting filters rather than depending on us knowing how to build a query correctly.
Limitations on emailing tickets to patrons.
Limitations on refunding capabilities if multiple refunds are needed on the same order.
Could improve outward-facing online forms and the ease with which customers build a shopping cart and update their own account.
Likelihood to Recommend
Destinations with both membership/donations and admissions will benefit from Altru's capability to track revenue from all angles. As a pretty robust system, you'll find many ways to utilize Altru including through mailings and mailing lists, major donor moves management, merchandise, and online forms.
Our museum uses Altru as an institutional constituent database. We chose Blackbaud's product to find a way to merge multiple data points across multiple departments - education, ticketing, reservations, donors, volunteers, shop, marketing and finance. Our goal was to better understand visitor use of our site to develop stronger experiences, target marketing, and philanthropic asks.
Pros
Cloud based database provides access from anywhere we have internet access across our 40 acre campus.
Constituent tracking provides powerful data tools to understand all points of contact with visitors.
Basic and in-depth training programs offered, providing staff with the knowledge they need for successful use of the product.
Cons
Query system not user-friendly for management with limited database background.
Limited company-to-user support outside of an online community of users. No long term account managers for program.
No email analysis tools for eblasts.
Limited merchandise capabiity for shop use, though the program does allow third party programs to work with it.
Likelihood to Recommend
Altru shines in capturing constituent data. If you are looking for a product to collect user info and their use patterns then this database works. The challenge is getting the data out in a format usable for decision making and application. Reporting can be a bear. The preloaded key performance indicators and reports are useful but may not fit your need. Every institution is different, and every department has different needs. This product tries to bridge the gaps to create communication between areas, but at a cost. This will not serve any of the departments at 100% of what is wanted out of a database. Altru is a whole institution choice for the benefit of cross-department collaboration.
Altru is used in various capacities throughout our organization. It is used as a donor and member database and is our primary point of sales systems through visitor services. We also use Altru to manage our events and programs, as well as to process program registrations and RSVP's. Additionally, Altru is used to create HTML emails used for our e-blasts and designated membership emails.
Pros
Point of Sales system, which is very user-friendly, and easy to navigate.
Member Database, which is easy to search through to locate information on patrons.
Event Calendar and Listings, which is organized and color coded.
Cons
Not ideal to use for e-blasts. It is difficult to manipulate and code through Altru.
Registering and managing multi-day events. Altru does not have the capacity to "sell" registrants into multi-session events. You have to work around the system in order to account for attendees in each session of the event.
Customizing web forms for program registration is a little bit difficult to figure out and to execute.
Likelihood to Recommend
Altru is best suited for a primary sales system and donor and member management database. It is good at compiling and exporting user data and input into queries and Excel sheets. It is not suited for class and camp registration, especially if they involve multiple days and weeks. Altru does not have the capacity to sell or manage multi-day events, without some manipulation through the "back end" of the system.
Our entire organization, from the art museum to the conservancy, uses Altru to help manage daily sales, events and programs, memberships, group sales, fundraising, and development. We have been using it now for a little over a year and are having success in utilizing it across the board in a way we were not able to do with our old system. Before Altru, all of our departments used separate systems that did not "talk" to each other. Now we are all on one system and are able to work together in a more productive way.
Pros
The system is very intuitive and easy to learn, especially the sales functions.
The support resources are fantastic. From finding the answer by yourself on the knowledge base, to talking to chat support, to after hours support - I have had very good experience working with their support team.
Being able to have all of the departments across our organization put all of their information on one platform is an amazing improvement to what we had before Altru.
Since it is internet based, you can access it from anywhere - which is great when I am not in the office and need to fix something. I just jump on it on my phone!
Cons
We would love to see the merchandise piece of Altru improve. Currently we use another POS system for our merchandise, because Altru does not support selling merchandise online. I would love to be able to use the same system across the board for all of our sales - tickets and merchandise.
I wish the reporting was more encompassing. You can use query to build your own reports, but it can be time consuming to get exactly what you want. And there seem to be a lot of reports that give you similar information, just in different ways - which can be a little confusing at first.
I really wish you could delete old events & price types. Even if they are attached to old orders, if there was a away to keep that history but get rid of the event &/or price type, it would clear a lot of junk out of our system.
Likelihood to Recommend
Our organization has had great success with Altru. You can find a lot of work-arounds for things in Altru, so even if it is not exactly what your organization is used to doing, you can usually always find a way to make it work. And Altru is great at listening to feedback from its users. If there is something that the Altru community is really pushing for, they will usually try and implement it in one of their many updates throughout the year.
The RISD Museum uses Altru for all membership, ticketing, event registration, donations, acknowledgements -- pretty much everything except for collection management. Before moving to Altru in 2012, we used a separate system in each department. There was one system for admissions, another for online sales, another for membership. Then there were myriad spreadsheets and pieces of paper where visitor contact information was kept. In order to create an invitation list for an event, we would spend at least two weeks just gathering the data. But the biggest win came for our members. Before switching to Altru, a new membership card would reach the visitor, on average, 21 days after we received the application. With Altru, it took just 2 days! Overall, Altru has provided a huge improvement in efficiency which makes our work easier and gives us more time to focus on what's truly important: visitors to the Museum.
Pros
Instant sharing of data across departments. When a visitor's address is updated at the front desk, that information is available immediately to our development staff.
360 degree view of our visitors. We can see all of a visitor's activity -- when they're coming to the museum, what events they attend -- which gives us a better understanding of their needs.
Altru can be accessed from anywhere. If we hold an event off-site, we can still handle admissions/registrations so long as there is a network.
Altru Tech Support is awesome! They are very patient and, if they don't know the answer, they find out for you.
Cons
There is no online sales for merchandise.
The way you have to set up events that span multiple days (such as camps) is currently very clunky and not user-friendly for online registration.
The online shopping experience needs improvement. Visitors expect Amazon-level ease-of-use and Altru just isn't there yet.
Likelihood to Recommend
The one thing to keep in mind if you switch to Altru is that, like with any enterprise system, you're not just buying a piece of software, you're also buying the underlying business practices. The biggest hiccups the RISD Museum had in switching to Altru weren't related to the software as much as they were related to figuring out how to do our business within the constraints of the system. Fortunately, Altru was a very close match to what we already did.
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
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.
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.
