Name: Creating and Using Discounts
Uploaded: 2025-09-17T19:00:05.906Z
Duration: 27 min
Description: Creating and Using Discounts

Transcript for "Creating and Using Discounts": Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining me today. We're gonna get this session rolling in just a moment. We're just gonna wait for more people to join us. Hope you're all having a fantastic day. Hello, Dagmar? That one from Baton Rouge. I've been to Baton Rouge. Baton Rouge. I've been there, but it was 1998. So I bet you guys have probably changed a few things since I last went through there. Still, if you guys have never been, fantastic restaurants. Hello, Kendra. Alright. We're starting to roll and I'm loving that some people have already found the chat. It's in the upper right. And that's a great way to talk to me. Today, we're gonna talk about the finer points of Altru. We're gonna be creating and using some discounts. This is Blackbaud Connect for Success. Hello, Amy, and happy Wednesday to you. Got people from New York, North Carolina. Oh my god. Everyone's everywhere. Louisiana. Okay. I'm glad to meet you. If you haven't seen me in one of these success sessions yet, my name is Evan and hello to you. I'm a customer success manager here at Blackbaud. I am one of the local Altru gurus and I try to walk you guys through some finer points of Altru and help you guys get a better use of it. I live in Windham, Maine where it's been a lovely, autumnal autumnal weather lately. The apple picking is in full bloom and my local ice cream shop just started putting out its fall flavors. If you guys have never had an ice cream called pumpkin Oreo, you haven't lived. It's amazing. And it's never too late the season for ice cream. So that's me and if you wanna tell me a little bit about you, I would love to learn about you. That's right. You heard me. Pumpkin Oreo ice cream. So tell me about yourself. Like, what do you do? Where you are? What's your place of work? What does your work do? What's your favorite care bear when you were a kid? If you don't know who the care bears are, I don't know how to talk to you. So please, if you want to, go up in the upper corner, tell me a little bit about yourself. I would love to learn about who I'm talking with today. This is also a great chance for you guys to connect and meet with each other because everyone here is doing wonderful stuff. You guys all work in the arts and cultural and that's just one of my favorite, parts about Blackbaud. Knock Knock Children's Museum. Absolutely. I was I love the name of your museum. I always have. Children other children's museum. Thank you, Amy. Oh, yes. I love children's museum. I have a full grown child, but when he was young, as you can imagine, the, winters up here in New England get quite cold and children's museums pretty much saved my life. Thank you, Patty, for joining us and the Florida Aquarium's here. Hello, Nicole. Good to have you all here. So that's you guys and you've been talking and I appreciate that. A little housekeeping though. Audio is coming through your speakers. So if you can't quite hear me, just turn up your volume. You can do a refresh and that'll help with any technical issues. Use a chat right here where we talked about to talk to me. Everyone's been talking to me too. Oh, Santa Fe joined in. Hello, Santa Fe Botanical Gardens. We got some Virginia. Everyone's here. Hi, Catherine. So, yeah. That's your local stuff right here. But let's get talking about the meat of the matter. What are we learning about today? We're learning about discounts. Okay. This is, Blackbaud, and you can use this to create a wide variety of discounts to suit a ton of different purposes. You can create discounts on your tickets, discounts on your items, discounts for only specific memberships, or discounts for specific constituencies. The reality is the opportunities to use these discounts are huge and the way to use them is varied. So really recommend that you spend some time learning how to do it, get in there, play with the discounts. We're gonna talk about it today, but learn how to use these because they're a great way to drop some business and to show some love to your local communities. So when we're creating a discount, you have to stop and say, what are some things I need to get ready? How is this gonna be applied? Like, is it kinda manually applied? Disc automatically applied? Are we gonna use a code? Who's gonna get this discount? Does everyone get the discount? Do only certain people get it? Do we only want the discount to apply at nighttime? You can actually set a discount to only apply on Tuesdays between 04:30 and 04:45, if that's what you want. How long is this discount gonna last? Is it gonna always exist? Is it only gonna be for the month of October? Pumpkin discount. What specifically is going to be discounted? All merchandise, just merchandise that starts with the letter q? There's so many things you can do to break down how this works that you really wanna, like, make a plan. But after you're thinking about doing a discount, just get in there. We'll dig in some more. When we're getting started, you gotta remember that discounts are located in the ticket area under discounts and promotions. Just as I mentioned before earlier, these don't always have to apply to tickets only. So you can, set it up to do things for, like, merchandise and other stuff. And there are three types of discounts that you can create. The most common, of course, is standard. It's the standard. And the other types are just as useful though and make sure you've given yourself an opportunity to play with them all and give them a try because some of them can be really good. So a standard discount can be applied to any program or merchandise item that you organize sales. So a student discount is 10% off tickets maybe or 10% off merchandise if they've got an ID. You can configure standard discounts for individual items or you can have it do it for an entire order. So you can restrict them to the sales method, like these are only available online or these are only available at the front desk. You can have it set by the day and the time. You can have it even broken down by patron address, memberships, or constituencies. You can actually have a discount that's like this is only for people who live within a 100 feet of the Santa Fe Botanical Garden. Not that you wanna give those particular neighbors a special discount, but you can. A required purchase discount is different. Unlike a standard discount which applies to any item without a condition, this has only savings if they buy a specific item. For example, you can set up a discount where purchasing one full price ticket grants a free or discounted ticket. And these discounts can also apply to merchandise or a mix of tickets and merchandise. The possibilities are endless and they have that same restrictions that you can do from standard, like, it can only be for certain memberships or certain times of the day. And then you have the quantity discounts. The quantity discount, you configure discounts that are applicable when a specific number of tickets or merchandise is purchased. If you buy 10 t shirts, you get one t shirt free. Right? Quantity discounts can apply automatically, manually, or promotion codes, whatever they're met. You have to set a specific price to apply to all your tickets or items sold if the designated quantity is purchased. For tickets, the specific price discount is given regardless of price types as long as the quantity is met. So if the pre the per ticket cost is already lower than the quantity discount, then it's gonna keep the lower price which is good. There are restrictions and this is, how you can set it up to work for only specific people. So it lets you create discounts that can only apply to a certain person or work in certain situations. We have lots of ways that we can put restrictions on them. We can do it with a membership level. We can do it with a constituency. You can do it by address. You can also set a certain date and time that it's available. You can also set, a sales method that's only available. You can also make it so that it only works for specific programs and you can also make it for specific merchandise. So there's a lot of ways to really narrow down the use of these discounts, but also gives you a ton of ways to utilize these discounts. Also, you have to ask yourself how is this going to apply manually, automatically, with a code? Think about how you want it to work. If it's automatic, that means that the parameters and the discount are bet, it's gonna go into effect without any intervention from your staff. Manually means you need to select it before completing your order by clicking by clicking on the discount and promotions buttons on the daily screen. Okay? And if you have with code, that means that there's gonna be a prompt where a code needs to be entered before the discount applies. Okay. Jacqueline asked a great question here. It says, why can you set membership restrictions for ticket discounts but you can't do the same for membership promotions? A membership promotion is different than a discount, sort of, because it's not set up through the same process. It's actually part of the membership program itself. Does that make sense? So you can't set a membership restriction on a membership or promotion. It should only work for people that are member of that promotion. Does that make sense? Or did I use the word membership too many times in one sentence? But a membership promotion is separate from a discount. It's designed to get people to renew earlier or renew if they weren't thinking about renewing. So what is this discount gonna cover? Make sure you, think about this too. There's two options here. There's the entire order or the single item. If you're gonna have it to use a single item, which is the most common thing, then you need to add more specifics to make sure it works the way you want it to. If you have to set cover the entire order, then all you need to think about is how much it's gonna take off. You're welcome, Jackie. Glad you asked. So thinking about when you again, when you set it to I wanna do cover the entire order or a specific item, you also have to think about the calculation type. Is it a percentage off or amount off? Typically, people do a percentage off for, like, the entire order or, single item is using more like an amount. But if you don't mind, I'd like to do a little show and tell for you guys. So I'm going to close my screen where I've been sharing and it's going to go to an Altru's screen and I'm gonna show you guys just some of the things we've been talking about. You should be looking at my Altru. I'm gonna tell you right away, this is a fake Altru database. This is no company's database. This is the one that all the people in my department get to play with and we go in here and we use it to help learn about Altru and we also use it to help you guys as well. So it's full of fake data. Okay? Hope you enjoyed that picture of me and my son walking on the beach too as well. So this is our Altru database right here and we're gonna go over here to tickets, ticket and merchandise discounts. These are all the fake ones that are already in our system. So we'll click on add. Now this is where you have your first choice. Are we gonna do required, standard, or quantity? I'm gonna start with the standard here, show you just some of the good stuff in here. Okay. So you can name it. Obviously, you have to. I do recommend a description in here and actually, the more you wanna put in here, the better. It It is gonna help when people come back and they go, why was this discount put in here? And you ask yourself, why would I need to know that? Because you're not gonna all stay working for the same organization forever. I'm sure they want you to, but let's be honest. And you probably remember this yourself. There's been a lot of turnover at your organization. So everywhere you leave clues for the next person is helpful when they take over. They look at these discounts and they wonder why is this discount doing this, who made this and why, by by putting in the description, you can help them. Most of the time, you're gonna want it set for automatically. I do wanna show you though that when you go to the with code area, it'll give you an opportunity to create your code And you can create how long this code is gonna be valid for. And then it will only work during that time. If you have it set automatically, which is that, that's gonna work like this. Now when you set it to the order, all you gotta ask yourself is it the amount off or the percent off? If it's a percent off, it's gonna ask you this in numbers like that. That's gonna be 10% off. Do I want this to apply to merchandise, to tickets, and to event packages? Sure. Maybe maybe I do. Availability. When is this gonna be available? Restrict discounts to these memberships, these constituencies, or by patent, patron address. For the patron address, this is basically a smart query that is gonna pull up people of a particular area. This one's already created right here. If you need to make your own, you can just click on this button right here and it will let you create your own query, to pull together the people that fit your address. Okay? I wanna come back here though and show what it looks like when it's actually an item because this is a more particular thing. So if we do this, we're gonna take $10 off. It applies to tickets and it applies to merchandise. If it applies to tickets, is it gonna apply to any price type? Is it gonna apply to just a price type of adults, maybe a group adult, whatever. You're gonna pick that in there and you're gonna decide how it goes. You can set it to apply to event packages. You can also limit the number of times the discount can be applied, meaning it can only work one time in particular order. When you're looking at the availability tab, of course, we talked about this. This is where you can set up where it's gonna work. Maybe you don't want this to be for online sales. It's only in daily sales so people can walk in the front door and get it. You can also specify a program that this is gonna work for. Otherwise, it's gonna work for every program in here. But if you say this is gonna only work for a specific program, then you can say, yeah. I'm gonna do this just for this one right here. That's the only one they can get a discount on. If you go into merchandise, right now it's set to all discountable merchandise. And you should know that when you add merchandise in your system, you can set it up so that a merchandise can never have a discount for it. Maybe you just don't want people to be giving a discount on the jewelry zone, so you can set that in there. We actually covered that in a different Connect for Success session on merchandise, which I think you can find. It's in our historical database. Patty, you there is no way to stop it from somebody from going in, buying it, and then coming out and then buying it again. That's what you're asking. The member check discount's gonna stop somebody from doing it in that particular order. But if they just keep, like, closing out, coming back in, and closing out, and coming back in, and doing it over and over again to get it, then it's gonna be a problem. That's something you wanna talk about, like, with, your internal team. But it depends on really what you're working on specifically. Then you could probably talk to, your customer success manager. We could set up a meeting with them and see if there's any way to troubleshoot that. But it is tough because once people leave and come back, it can come in. I do wanna show you that you don't have to do this on all merchandise. You can set it for specific departments. Hopefully, you're using departments or specific merchandise in general. If you do that, it's gonna let you put in a list of your merchandise and then you can actually just pull up what it is and you say, we're gonna do a discount on bacon. I'm sorry to say you you are having that as a problem, Patty. You know, we we like to hope that our members are good upstanding citizens. Sometimes they sort of abuse the the powers that we give them. So once you've got all this set up, you're ready to go with your new discount and you can do so many different types of discounts in here. I will say, we're gonna look really quickly with the quantity and the required purchase ones, there is a lot, you know, to think about. Okay. So with this one, you can do it as a manually. Can you choose multiple items on that screen or do you have to do one discount at a time? You do have to do one discount at a time. Thank you for asking that, Amy. It's designed to do one discount at a time on purpose because if you try to do multiple ones, it is possible that you could make a mistake and create tons of discounts at the same time that would immediately go into play and that might not be something you wanna do. So with this one, it's gonna usually be manually or with code. There's no way to automatically do a discount that requires a purchase because people need to check-in on that. So with this one, you're gonna go in and you're gonna say, it's a if I do a ticket, quantity at full price and then, you know, you can set all your things in here. Let's limit discount to same event or you can do same program, which means that it's gonna be, within that same program but not the same day, for example. You can also, again, limit the number of times that this can be applied. There's a lot of different things you can do. You can do your programs too. It it changes. If I go to merchandise, it'll add a merchandise thing right here. So there's a lot of opportunities in there to create some things and make some fun stuff so you can have discounts. They're really helpful for getting people into your stores. Forget me. So if you have a gift shop and you're trying to get people to utilize it more, I recommend creating some discounts for people walking in the door, special days. On Tuesdays, you know, if you come in here and you say, you know, I'm here for a Tuesday discount, you know what I mean, they can say, well, go to the store and there's one there, for Tuesdays, you know, 10% off candy bars, whatever you want. With this one right here, which is your discount by quantity, Again, if you go into merchandise, you can say it's a specific price, quantity of of at least 10, and you want this to apply to all merchandise or specific departments. The availability is pretty much the same. You can maybe do it for just constituencies or just memberships. And you can just set this one for automatic, which means that if somebody buys 10 things, that they'll get them at a discount of $9 as opposed to 10. So there's a lot of opportunities in there. We just wanna talk briefly with just how they're applied. Like I said, most of the time, you're gonna see these at your front desk, and that's where you're gonna be utilizing them the most. And you can create a discount button in there. These are some resources that I pulled together that I thought you guys might find helpful. These are particularly, helping a full with discounts. You cannot click on this picture though. However, if you go up to the chat area and you look right above it, it says the word docs. You'll see all of these resources listed in the doc section where you can click on them and open them. I highly recommend you take a moment and go up there and check them out because those are a great place to get some great resources on how to create discounts and how to utilize discounts. If you love Altru but you wanna do even more with it or if you feel like you just don't understand Altru enough to be getting the most out of it, you may be interested in a Blackbaud advisory plus subscription. They are a fantastic way for you to get more out of your system. You basically would be getting a one to one consulting designed to help you achieve specific goals by having an Altru, expert meet with you on a regular basis. It is a subscription based program. And if you're interested in it, just put something in the chat and I'll have somebody reach out to you guys and talk to you about it. But it is something that a lot of organizations are adopting and has a very popular response right now. If you are also interested in engaging with Blackbaud and your peers more often, you could be interested in our reference program or a Blackbaud champion program or maybe you just wanna do a spotlight of success. With the spotlight of success, you are talking to us about a particular item that you're proud of, something that happened in your organization did and how we helped you with our Blackbaud software to make it work. I really appreciate when customers do this. This is the kind of stuff that appears in bbcon and other type things that we do. It's a great way to position yourself as a leader in your community. It is a great way to show your organization's great works. So if you guys are ever interested in that, just reach out to us. You can put it in the chat. I am launching a survey right now and I would appreciate if you guys took a moment to check it out because your opinion does indeed matter. And take a few minutes to fill out that survey can help me make future sessions and help Blackbaud understand better the needs of the people we work with. So if take a moment and fill that out, I would appreciate it. I also wanna take a moment from my side to say thank you to you guys and everything that you do. The arts and cultural is a huge part of what makes Blackbaud successful. But more importantly, what you guys do in your communities is super important. You are a value, valuable, valuable menu. And you guys do so much great work for your communities and the people around you. You give so much back and I appreciate you. I understand how hard it is to be a nonprofit. You guys do great stuff. And as a fan of the arts, I am just a fan of you guys and everything that you do. So appreciate you guys for everything that you do. I appreciate you for coming today and listening to me talk about discounts. My name is Evan, and it's been a pleasure to meet you guys today and talk about ice cream. So if you have any questions, throw it in the chat right now. But if not, thanks very much, and have a great rest of your day. And thank you for filling out that survey. Thanks, Kendra. Have a great day.