Creating an Online Holiday Catalog

Moriah Lorusso

Hi Everyone! 


Does anyone have any idea or experience in creating an Online Holiday Catalog in Blackbaud Altru similar to the organization's links below? Ideally, I'd like each clickable item to be separate so was hoping to avoid creating the catalog as a fundraising hierarchy, as there's no way to separate the fundraising items there if I'm not mistaken. Any comments and feedback would be greatly appreciated!

https://www.oxfamgifts.com/?

https://support.savethechildren.org/site/Ecommerce?store_id=1241&FOLDER=0&TYPE=&SORT_ORDER=name#section--products

https://donate.worldvision.org/giftcatalog


Best, 

Moriah 

Katie MacDonald

Hi Moriah,


As far as we're aware, there is not a function in Altru for selling retail items online.  We looked into this as we're starting to sell kits for kids at our children's museum.  After digging through the Altru community, there were other museums that were frustrated that they couldn't turn their retail items into an online store via Altru.  The webforms aren't set up for online retail. The only roundabout way to do it is as you mentioned, setting up something in the fundraising hierarchy.  We decided against this as we didn't want sales revenue funneled through the fundraising channels.  It would be great if we could all band together and request that Altru create a online retail sales function!


Good luck!

Katie MacDonald

WOW! Children's Museum 

Moriah Lorusso

Hi Katie! 


Thank you for your feedback! It would be wonderful if Altru could make retail items available online, I completely agree. Our future online catalog will essentially be an ongoing fundraising tool (there's no physical merchandise associated with it), so it makes sense for us to create a fundraising hierarchy - I just wish we could structure the web page differently! Perhaps we should all band together; We're stronger in numbers!


Thanks again, 

Moriah Lorusso 

The Maritime Aquarium 

KAS Shannon Knight

When selling just a few items, I've set the "merchandise" up as tickets. That way it's not going through fundraising but is instead an event. Using WorldVision as an example, it could be set up something like this:


Program: World Vision Gifts

Event: Holiday Catalog

Price Types:

• 2 Chickens - $25
• 2 Soccer Balls - $16
• Goat & 2 Chickens - $110
• etc.

But it really only works if you have very few items.

Moriah Lorusso

Thank you so much for the suggestion Shannon!


I thought of that too, and it's definitely a better option than creating a fundraising hierarchy where there doesn't necessarily need to be one, (you also get the individual links and web pages that way!)  but I couldn't seem to create a program or program event without a time imputed and listed on the web page. I thought that might look a little odd for an ongoing Holiday Catalog. 


Still considering that as an option though!


Best, 

Moriah Lorusso 

The Maritime Aquarium 

KAS Shannon Knight

If you sell it as a pre-registered event -- even if you don't use any of the pre-registration options -- you could change the date and time headers to something like this:



 

Sarah Osborne

The idea for incorporating Ecommerce into Altru doesn't have much traction in the IdeaBank, but I agree that it would be incredibly helpful...especially now! 
https://community.blackbaud.com/products/altru/ideas?_ga=2.139788019.1732827566.1598043587-105397705.1586377733 - if you feel like upvoting! 


We also want to start selling activity kits through our website and I like the idea of funneling them through Programs/Events rather than our fundraising hierarchy. I don't imagine that we would mail these out, since we are a small community, so maybe the time would determine pickup? Perhaps a certain number of kits available each day with multiple time slots? That might be our solution. We are still closed to the public, so this would not interfere with timed ticket sales for admission-- if you are open it may not work!