Please Welcome Our Three New Altru Community Champions!

 

Here within Team Altru, we’re extremely proud of our Community Champions Program. This program is designed to both encourage and reward participation within the community from Altru clients like yourselves.  As of this month, we have 21 active Champions.  Through their participation, our community—and our client base—is enriched.  Last month we added three new champions. Please join me in welcoming them to the ranks: Leanne Smith of The Strong National Museum of Play, Susan Augenbraun of New York Transit Museum, and Dianne Crosby of Red Butte Garden.

 

Here’s a bit more about each of them:

Leanne Smith

Q: What’s your favorite part of Altru?

A: Well, I love working on queries in analysis. I am a hardcore novice but being able to pull and verify data pleases my inner nerd. I took some query classes with Altru (btw those classes are great to have) and I practice learning the software's fields by a trial and error basis. I do hope to take my training further and be able to build some more complex queries.

Q: How has Altru helped you or your organization?

A: By giving us a starting point with a really solid software foundation. Since I work in the group sales mod I do see how great this software can be with some upgrades down the road. I have been "vocal" about this in the community and so have some of my fellow members. However, I do feel that Altru is addressing functionality and is working side by side with community members to take us further. In my experience in Group Sales and being through three software systems, there is not a software system out there without some cons nor is there one that I have seen or worked with that hits a department wide set of so many pros like Altru has. One major pro was doing away with paid user specific licenses. This has allowed us to have "new" users in our organization. I found that to be a great thing for staff members to be able to rely less on request forms and separate spreadsheets and actually be able to use Altru for their own specific needs.

Susan Augenbraun

Q: What’s your favorite part of Altru?

A: I work primarily with the Group Sales calendar, so I think that has to get my vote. But I also rely on the Information Library and on queries for a lot—I love data! I suppose it’s really the two in combination: entering all the information I get into Group Sales allows me to later get all sorts of useful spreadsheets out of it.

Q: How has Altru helped you and your organization?

A: Based on what my colleagues and supervisors have told me, I know that the reporting tools in particular have been an improvement. We’re also able to collect a lot more data now than we could previously—so one of the things that we’re working on, in my department at least, is making better use of the data we already have.

Altru has also helped me make connections with colleagues in the field: when the staff at a nearby institution was thinking about making the switch, I showed one of them how we use Group Sales and how it works for our school group visits. Since I’m still in the beginning stages of my career, it’s important for me both to meet other people and to remind myself (and others!) that I do have a lot of knowledge worth sharing.

Dianne Crosby

Q: What’s your favorite part of Altru?

A: I manage the Front Desk and Gift Shop staff.  My favorite Altru feature is Daily Sales.  I love that my staff can sell an admission ticket, membership and/or merchandise all in one transaction.  Our gift shop is mere steps away from our admission desk.  Before we had two separate systems, requiring separate transactions at the separate desks.

Q: How has Altru helped you or your organization?

A: This has helped us because we no longer have to send a customer to another desk to pay for something else.  And when the line starts to get long at one location we can offer to help a customer from the other.  Being able to sell tickets and memberships in the gift shop or sell merchandise at the front desk has really helped us better serve our customers!