Shopping for digital membership cards and a member self-service portal usually starts with one vendor name, and Cuseum is often the first one an Altru shop hears about. That’s a reasonable place to start, but it shouldn’t be the end of the search. The options differ in ways that matter more than the demo screens: how they talk to Altru, what happens to a card when a member renews, and whether your door staff can actually scan the barcode.
This guide won’t rank vendors against each other. Features and pricing change, and anything we said about another company’s product would be stale or secondhand. Instead, here’s how we’d evaluate any option, including ours, if we were the membership manager signing the contract.
First, decide what problem you’re solving
“Digital cards and a portal” bundles three different jobs together:
- Proving membership at the door. A card in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet that staff can scan or glance at, replacing plastic cards and printed letters.
- Letting members help themselves. Checking their expiration date, renewing, upgrading, and updating an address or email without calling you.
- Keeping Altru accurate. Every renewal, upgrade, and profile change landing on the right constituent record without someone re-keying it.
Some organizations only need the first. Others are drowning in renewal calls and need the second more than anything. Knowing which one hurts most tells you where to push hardest in demos.
Native Altru: check what you already have
Before buying anything, confirm what your current Altru setup covers. Altru supports membership web forms for joining and renewing, and it can produce membership cards for printing. Whether your instance can issue wallet passes directly, or offer a logged-in area where members see their own record, isn’t something we’d assume either way. Ask Blackbaud support or your account contact, and test any answer in a sandbox before you plan around it. If native tools meet your needs, you’ve saved a budget line.
Questions that separate one option from another
How does it connect to Altru?
This is the big one. Ask whether the product reads and writes Altru directly or works from periodic exports. A nightly sync means a member who renews at 10 a.m. may show as expired at your door that afternoon. Ask specifically:
- How quickly does a new or renewed membership appear on the card and in the portal?
- When a member updates their email in the portal, does it change the Altru constituent record, or sit in a separate database waiting for review?
- Who maintains the connection when Altru changes, and what happens if it breaks?
What happens to the card after renewal or upgrade?
Wallet passes can be updated after they’re installed, but not every product does it the same way. Ask whether the expiration date and membership level on the member’s phone update on their own, or whether the member has to download a new pass. Members rarely read the “please re-add your card” email.
Will the barcode scan at your entrance?
Find out what the barcode on the card actually encodes and whether your current scanning setup reads it. Bring a test card to the front desk during the trial and try it on the devices staff really use. A beautiful card that has to be typed in by hand isn’t saving anyone time.
How do renewals get paid for?
If the portal offers renewal, ask where the payment is processed, which processor is involved, and how the revenue lands in Altru. Your finance team will want to know whether it arrives as a clean transaction tied to the membership or as something that needs reconciling in a batch later.
How do households and multiple cardholders work?
Family and dual memberships are where many tools get awkward. Ask how a second adult gets their own card, whether named cardholders come from Altru, and what a member sees when they log in from a household with several people.
Branding, pricing, and exit
- Can the card and portal carry your logo, colors, and domain, or do members see the vendor’s brand?
- Is pricing flat, per member, or tied to transaction volume? Model it at your expected membership size two years out.
- If you leave, what data do you keep? Ideally the answer is “everything important is already in Altru.”
One vendor or two?
Buying cards and the portal from the same provider is simpler to manage, and the two pieces tend to agree with each other. Buying separately can make sense if one product is clearly stronger at the job you care most about. The test is whether both read from the same Altru data. If they do, mixing vendors is workable. If each keeps its own copy, expect members to see different expiration dates in different places.
Running a fair trial
- Pick five real member records covering your messy cases: a household, a recent upgrade, a lapsed member, a gift membership, and someone with two email addresses.
- Have each vendor show those records on a card and in the portal, not their demo data.
- Renew one of them through the portal and time how long until Altru, the card, and the door scanner all agree.
- Ask your front desk lead to scan the cards. Their opinion counts more than the slide deck.
Where Social Good fits
We build add-ons for organizations staying on Altru, and digital cards are one of them. Digital Membership Cards puts Altru members’ cards in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, and it pairs with our Membership Portal, where members view status, renew, upgrade, and update their profile against live Altru data. Put us through the same trial above.
