Name: Mastering Data Management: Altru - Managing Merchandise
Uploaded: 2025-06-18T15:00:04.778Z
Duration: 28 min 20 s
Description: Mastering Data Management: Altru - Managing Merchandise

Transcript for "Mastering Data Management: Altru - Managing Merchandise": Hello and good morning or afternoon depending on where you are in the world. Thank you for joining me. I see our number is climbing. I appreciate you all joining us this morning. So I'm gonna give it just a moment while I let the rest of you join. Grab your coffee, sit back, get comfortable, because we'll be launching any second now. Thank you for joining me. Just waiting for a few more people to join. Okay. It is now one minute past our starting time, so I'm gonna start if that's okay with y'all. Today, we're gonna be talking about, managing merchandise for our Altru series on data management. I hope you guys are ready to rock and roll. A little bit about myself, for those of you that don't know me, my name is Evan, and I am a customer success manager here at Blackbaud. So So happy to meet you all. Hello. Our mission as customer success managers is to help you guys be successful, see the value in their products, so to work with you and determine what your goals are, help you guys surpass them. So, there's a lot of these sessions are out there. I hope to see you guys in the future ones. And, please keep an eye on your emails for more information, and our webinar series is out there as well. And now is the part where I wanna hear from you guys. If you look up in the upper right, there is a chat section where you can write to me, say good morning, say hello. More importantly, maybe tell me, what you guys do, where you are, what's going on at your place of work, what you have for breakfast, anyone have anything exciting, any really good donut shops near you, that kind of stuff. I'd like to hear from you and know who's in my audience and, more importantly, just make sure that that chat is working. Good morning, Ashley. Is it as rainy in Connecticut? Is it as in Maine, Ashley? Good morning, Laura. Good morning, Ash, Carrie and Robbie. Hey, Elizabeth. It's at Colby College. I'm in, Wyndham, Maine right now, Elizabeth. That's where I live and work. Glad to see all of you up and about. Thank you so much for reaching out in your chat and talking to me. I'm gonna make sure that the chat is working and I'm glad to see it is. That is the best place to ask a question, say something to me, but also to maybe share something with your, peers. If you see somebody ask a question in there and you're like, oh, I've got a great answer for that or this is something that we do, please feel free to share it. Sharing with each other is one of the best resources we have here at Blackbaud, and you guys can really be a help to each other and help drive these things going forward. I just wanna say thank you though to all of you for the work you do. The arts and culture is such an important part of our society, and you guys are all nonprofits. And you're just bringing so much great things to your communities around you that you serve, and I appreciate you. Brandon said he grabbed a coffee in Saint Pete. Oh my. Is it warm down in Saint Pete? Because I feel like it's already too humid up here in Maine. I saw some people from Arizona, although they say that's not humid in Arizona. But still, I know it's been hot down in Arizona. Okay. Oh, we're all getting a heat wave too, right, coming up? Ugh. Not looking forward to it. Incredibly warm, Brandon. Thanks. I, will tell you this, though. I always go to Florida in the wintertime. I appreciate you guys being down there for me in the February. Okay. So like I said, keep sharing in that chat. Use it. I'll keep an eye on it, but we're gonna roll forward. We have some quick housekeeping just so you understand. This is broadcast through your computer speakers, so hopefully you hear me. If you have any technical issues such as slides freezing, a quick refresh of the browser is best way to get it working. Worst case scenario, we maybe leave log on again. So yeah. There's a documents section also I wanna talk about. It's in the upper right next to chat. Make sure to click on that. There's some great stuff in there. And hopefully, you use it to make managing your merchandise even easier. Okay. Let's talk really quickly about merchandise and why we care at all. First of all, it's income. Right? You guys love income. Income in stores like this, in your little gift shops, they often keep people in the store, keep people coming back. It's just a great way to have a better experience with your, merchants, many people. But in Altru, you guys have the power to make your gift shop more than a great place to find stuffed animals. You can gather information on constituents with every purchase and promote other ways to support your organization. So I hope you're taking advantage. Let's talk about getting started and what you need to do. Okay? If you already have your, store up and running, some of this is gonna feel like a little bit of overlay, but I wanna make sure everyone has this. And good morning to you, Kaylee. So you have to set up your inventory right before you can sell anything. You do this in the merchandise section of Altru. Okay? The first thing you'll need to do is create your departments and and your categories to organize your items, and that is actually really important that you spend some actual time in there. So we're gonna talk about it even more. Right? Also, you have to have a vendor in there, to sell something. So you'll need to enter your vendors, the track who supplies your merchandise. This is just good housekeeping, and you'll need to make sure you're doing it as diligently as possible. When you're in your departments, right, this is how you'll add your merchandise department. This is what it looks like on your screen. Make sure to add categories to your departments so that you can easily track the things that you sell. Remember, the more segmentation you do, the better your reporting on your success will be. Okay? The more information you have, the less questions you will have when you're running these reports. It seems like a lot of setup, but the more detailed you can be, the easier it is to track things, the easier it is to set things up, and the easier it is to train your new staff as well. Just some ideas to throw out here, your potential departments and category names, They can be very big and very small, depends on what you're looking for. Things like apparel, art, consignment, food and beverages. That's right. Sell your snacks. Some books, home decor, jewelry, media, miscellaneous, which is obviously all too frequently used, parking, which I wanna talk briefly about, and toys. And when I say parking, that's right. You guys can use your gift shop to sell your parking. In fact, a lot of people do, and it's a great way to track that if it's something that you sell. Or other, venue things like that can be done. Your vendors. Okay. So before you can enter merchandise, you must enter the vendor information. Again, be as detailed as you can with this. By adding the contact information in your vendors, you help make it easier to get new things in when you need new things and to track shipments as well. Vendor information in Altru is actually really great. People sometimes don't understand why, but it helps you resupply really fast and keep track of the businesses that you do. And these businesses also should be listed as constituents and in your system. You never know. They might wanna support you. When it comes to adding merchandise, obviously, you can do it one to on one. It is tedious, obviously. So we recommend that you add merchandise in a batch. With the batch, you can add a lot of merchandise at the very same time, and you can also use batch to update your inventory, which is something that we're gonna go over in a few minutes, and I'll show you how to do it. But I wanna make sure that you guys are utilizing that service. It's the absolute best way to do your merchandise. Don't forget that merchandise is a great place to use discounts. With discounts, Altru can set up special discounts on merchandise that apply to members or people with specific constituencies. Most of you have a membership program. I hope you do at least. And a lot of times, membership programs come with discounts on maybe tickets or early access to the museum or maybe even free admission to the museum. But, also, it's often done with a discount in your gift shop. I'll show you guys how to use a, gift shop discount to set it up so that your members can get a specific price off and how you can set it up to be very specific to what has a discount and what doesn't. But don't be afraid also to set up discounts for food and drinks for, like, your staff members. Perhaps you have people that work in you volunteer or do things like that and you wanna let them get potato chips at a discount in your gift shop. There's a way you can set up a discount for that as well. Okay? Don't be afraid to use discounts for all sorts of specialties. Also, Altru has a setup for checking on your inventory with something we call a physical count worksheet. We recommend that you do a physical count regularly to make sure your numbers are good. That in Altru, you can print a sheet with every piece of inventory that you've entered into it, and you can use that to do a count. After that, you use a specific type of batch called the merchandise physical count batch to actually update the inventory if it needs to be updated. This way, you have a good track of what is in your, gift shop and what is not in your gift shop, and your reporting stays accurate. We understand sometimes things happen. Sometimes you swear you had 10 stuffed teddy bears, but it turns out you only have eight. We just gotta make sure you're keeping track of everything as best as you can so that your numbers are good, so that you're super successful with your shot. Okay. And now I'm gonna do a quick demo. This should be mostly painless, but please let me know if you're having any issues seeing it. Just give me one second to set it up. Alright. This is a fake Altru database, so please don't judge it for whatever weirdness you see in here. This is an Altru database that we all have access to here at Blackbaud, and we use it for demonstration purposes just like today. So I'm gonna show you just a few things to get you started on your using. I'm gonna start by creating a department, show you how to batch some merchandise, and then create a discount. So we start off by going to our merchandise area right here, and we're gonna go over here and we're gonna look at all the different things we can do, like adding a vendor, which is important before you do things, adding your merchandise, and updating your inventory, but also creating departments. Okay. This right here is a list of all your current apartment departments and their categories that follow under. You can see if you've allowed a discount for one or not. So when you're getting in here, you're gonna wanna add a nice new department to start off. This is an important area to pay attention to. Our discounts allowed on merchandise in this department. Perhaps you don't wanna allow anything that get discounted at this. By unchecking this box, there will be no opportunity or way to get a discount on this merchandise under this particular department. A description helps people understand why things fall under this department. So, again, it's not necessary, but it is actually really helpful. Putting your categories right here is important again. You can enter anything you want really. The name is not nearly as helpful sometimes as the description, so make sure that you have a good description in here about what this is. Once you've got this all set up, it'll appear right here and you'll be able to see all the things you have. Okay? Now we've got our merchandise in there. We're happy. We've got a nice setup of categories. It's time to actually add some merchandise. So from the merchandise area, if you have go to an area right here that says update inventory. It's gonna take you to a merchandise inventory batch. We're gonna add a nice new batch here. We're gonna pick the receiving batch to start. This is a batch you do when you've got a new shipment, a box of stuff has come in, and you need to actually pop it in. From this section right here, you have the opportunity to look up an item that's already in your system. You can look up the brick the department and see things in here. And you can add those in right there. Now it it should bring up all the information that you've already entered into there. And now you're just gonna update the quantity that you just received in your shipment. If you need to enter something in here and it's actually nothing that you've ever used before, it's something that you ordered for the first time, so you don't have it in there. You can actually do an ad from this area right here. Add department. Make sure you know which vendor it goes with. What is its value? And now you've add a new thing right in here. Now we can put in how much we actually got of them, 300. We can change the unit cost on this. It cost us $2, and we're selling it for $4.50. Okay. So now you have new information added. You can continue to go down the line really quickly with your list of things that came in. When you're all set, you'll just hit save and close. And we're ready to commit this batch. We're gonna validate it and create an exception batch if there's any problems. And everything went perfect. We're all excited. Everyone's excited. Okay. The last thing I wanna show you really quickly is how to set up some discounts just because I think that they are a really important use of your merchandise area. So to do that, believe it or not, it's under tickets and tickets and merchandise discounts. We're gonna add a standard discount. You wanna say applies to item in this situation, not to orders. Uncheck applies to tickets. We're setting this up. We don't want this to apply to merchandise. Now you can set this to automatically, manually, which means it's something you have to add, or with code. Now if you wanna do something that's like a promotion, like a radio show promotion where you say, hey. If you come in to the gift shop and you mentioned you heard this on the radio, you know, something like that, you can get this discount. That might be something you do, like, with a code, and then you just have the code be something like radio. And when you just hit code like that, it'll actually give you what's nice about it is it'll give you a chance to do the code, but also a validate. So if it's only good from today to tomorrow, no one will be able to actually use that code after tomorrow. But if you haven't just set to automatically, it'll apply to any situation that meets the things you set up. Okay? So let's look at the availability. Also, we can limit the number of times this can be applied. It's only gonna be applied one time. Now with availability, you wanna leave it to all these things. That's fine. But more importantly, here's where you can say, this discount is only good for members. Right? So you add a pickup program, and then you say, anybody in that level or only a specific level gets these discounts, or you can restrict it to a specific constituency. Like, again, staff members or board members, things like that. So you can set it so that those guys get it. Also, under this merchandise area, you can say this applies to all discountable merchandise or specific departments. By choosing specific departments or specific merchandise, you might find a way of narrowing it down. Perhaps you want everyone to have a discount on pretty much everything, but you don't wanna provide a discount on your jewelry or your art because those things you need to make a full profit on. So you can go to specific departments and say this is gonna work for every one of these, but you're not gonna choose to use the jewelry department and they'll go that way. Once you've got this all set up, you've got yourselves a nice standard discount that'll work in the gift shop. Now for members to apply, they're gonna have to tell you they're members, which means you have to look them up in your system. Or for constituencies, people are gonna have to say, like, I should get this discount. We have to look them up in your system. This is another opportunity though for you guys to interact with the members and constituents in your area that are important part of your system. So this really helps you guys out by doing this stuff. Alright. That was my quick demo. I hope it wasn't too painful to watch. I just wanna talk to you guys really quickly about working with Blackbaud a little closer. Oh, I had a question in the is there a way to set up a line item discount rather than having the discount apply to every piece of merchandise bought? Yes, Robert. You could do a discount that's just to, a specific thing, but it's kind of complicated and I'd recommend reaching out to support for help on getting that done. So if you're interested in working with Blackbaud, we're always looking to talk to you guys, and we're looking for advocates, basically. People that spread the good word about, our products, but also people who spread the word about what they're doing with our products. That's what we're more passionate about than anything else. We're looking for people who are eager to make a difference and and share any success stories they've had with the world around them. K? Blackbaud champions have the opportunity to write blogs or stories about how you achieved goals or made specific impact in their communities. And we share those in, Connector Success sessions, in our, webinars and forums and things like that. Maybe we even have you guys over at BBCON for a chat with everybody. But it's a great way to get your information out there, your name, your community, who you're helping, what you're doing. That's awesome. So as a champion, we wanna also hear feedback from you guys so you can talk to Blackbaud teams and do professional development opportunities and other things like that. If this is something that you're interested in doing, please say something in the chat. Let me know. Say, yes, Evan. I would love to be a Blackbaud champion or an advocate. I would lovely appreciate that. I'm gonna also launch a survey in a second here, and that survey is gonna give you an opportunity to also, answer questions like, yes. I would like to participate. It also gives me feedback on the information I shared today, so I appreciate it if you fill it out. We have some resources. They're in the doc section. You can't click on these right here, but they are in the doc section. The Blackbaud Ultra Merchandise Guide is particularly helpful, although it is really big. I recommend you guys get in there and get a chance to look it all over and take that information home with you. One other thing you guys might be interested in, if you are looking to get more out of your system, more out of Blackbaud in general, you might consider signing up for advisory plus. If you guys haven't heard about it, it is a great subscription program that we offer to unlock potential. Right? One to one consulting to help achieve your goals, tailored guidance using your own specific data, organizational objectives, lot of experience. You talk to people who are really pros at Altru and more importantly, pros at helping nonprofits, to help you get best practices and improve your adoption. If you're interested in something like advisory plus, again, let me know in the chat. Say, Evan, I'd like to have somebody reach out to me and talk to me about advisory plus, and then I'll have somebody reach out and talk to you. But it it is a fantastic way to really maximize the amount of things you get out of your systems. My customers who use it absolutely love it. You do have other resources out there, Blackbaud University, of course, support and knowledge base, and a Blackbaud community as well. So please feel free to utilize those at any time to make sure you're getting the most out of your system. My absolute favorite, of course, is the Blackbaud community where you guys can share best practices and talk to each other about how you're doing great things with the system out there. I do appreciate everyone that filled out the survey. It is always helpful to get your feedback. And once again, thank you very much for spending the time with me today. I hope you guys have a great rest of your day, great rest of your week, and a great rest of the month. Beyond that, it's out of my control.