Automated system for nonprofit membership cards?

March 9, 2016 8:50 AM

I'm on the board of a small nonprofit and we want to try and automate our membership cards. Is there a service that will mail out a welcome letter for us every time someone places membership?

Here's some background info on our group: We are an alumni association and do not have a staff or offices and do not foresee ever hiring a staff. We also just started a year ago so we're still in the learning phase. People place membership randomly throughout the year and we currently have about 80 dues-paid members (yearly dues are $50). What we did last year was a large printing of membership cards all at one time before an event and handed them out at the event. The downside was that it took several months for people to get their card and if they placed membership after the printing, they never received one. We'd like to start mailing them out though immediately after they pay their dues, however this becomes a hassle for the volunteer membership coordinator.

We currently track our membership records through an Access database, but we would not be opposed to moving to a CRM tool if it was required for integration. Dues are generally paid online through Paypal on our website, but we do have a few people who mail in their dues.

Is there a service that we can pay that would automatically send out a welcome letter to a new member with a perforated membership card at the bottom?

posted by Deflagro to Work & Money (4 answers total)

Best answer: I can't recommend any specific services, but a Google search for "membership card fulfillment" yields several companies that print membership cards and offer this kind of service. Given the size of your membership, a semi-automated solution where the membership coordinator updates the Access database and then manually does something to tell the vendor to print and mail a welcome letter with a new card.

Or consider just ditching printed membership cards altogether. Sometimes life is too short for more pieces of plastic.
posted by zachlipton at 11:28 AM on March 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

A paid service seems way overkill for 80 memberships per year. Honestly I'd find a person and just have the emails about new paid membership auto emailed to them and they print and mail it.

If you already have the perforated cardstock or a way to do that then this is super easy. It is something I would even enjoy doing on the side but I bet a craigslist ad or if one of you has a basically responsible teenager they would think it was a super easy way to earn a bit of extra cash.
posted by magnetsphere at 11:29 AM on March 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah, ditch the cards and move to a membership management system like Chargbee. Does showing the card anywhere get them anything? How frequently are people using them?
posted by reddot at 3:07 PM on March 14, 2016

Response by poster: As a follow up, the main reason we were doing membership cards in the first place was because some of our older members are used to getting them from other similar organizations. In the process of researching this I stumbled onto CRM softwares that seem like they'd greatly improve our record keeping. I think our solution is going to be to implement one of those softwares that will automatically send them a welcome email with their Membership ID and a "card."
posted by Deflagro at 7:23 PM on March 22, 2016