Case Study: The Tenement Museum achieves 60% online ticket sales and boosts donations with Blackbaud's Altru

The Tenement Museum - Customer Case Study

The Tenement Museum preserves and interprets the lives of 19th‑century immigrants on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, welcoming tens of thousands of visitors annually, including 44,000 schoolchildren. With tours limited to 12–15 people and no real‑time availability online, visitors frequently arrived to find tours sold out; the museum also lacked a system to capture visitor data and cultivate donors.

To solve this, the museum launched a new website and onsite booking kiosks with real‑time scheduling tied to the Altru CRM and ticketing platform, eliminating double bookings and capturing visitor records for targeted follow‑up. The changes freed staff resources for training and programs and drove measurable gains: online/advanced sales rose to 60% (from 30%), daily sales increased 10%, individual giving and membership rose 14%, average membership gift grew nearly 60%, and transaction fees previously paid to a third party now stay with the museum.

The Tenement Museum