Printing, stuffing, and mailing plastic or cardstock membership cards costs postage and staff hours, and the card often shows up after the member’s first visit. So it’s no surprise that membership teams want to send the card by email instead. The catch is that Altru was built around producing printed cards, and getting a usable card into an inbox takes some planning.
Below are the realistic options, what each one asks of your staff, and the details that decide whether an emailed card actually works at your front gate.
First, decide what “the card” needs to do
Before you pick a method, be clear about what members will use the emailed card for. The answer shapes everything else.
- Proof of membership only. Staff look at it and look the member up in Altru by name. Almost any email works here, even a plain confirmation with the member’s name, level, and expiration date.
- Scanned at admission. The email has to carry a barcode that your scanners read and that matches the membership card or lookup ID in Altru. That’s a much higher bar.
- Used at partner or reciprocal sites. Other institutions will expect something that looks like a card: your logo, the member’s name, level, and expiration date on one screen.
Option 1: Print to PDF and email by hand
Many organizations start here. You run your usual membership card process in Altru, but instead of sending the output to a card printer, you save it as a PDF, then attach each member’s card to an email.
It works, and it costs nothing extra. It also doesn’t scale. Splitting a batch PDF into one file per member, matching each file to the right email address, and sending them one by one becomes a real chore once you’re past a handful of new members a week. It’s also easy to send a card to the wrong person, and a card is effectively an admission credential.
Use this if your volume is low, or as a stopgap while you set up something better.
Option 2: Put the card details in a confirmation email
The next step up is to skip the card image and send an email containing the information a card would carry: member name, membership level, member or card number, and expiration date. If your team already sends welcome or renewal acknowledgments, this can usually ride along with those.
Whether you can include a scannable barcode in an email sent through Altru’s own email tools is the part to verify, not assume. Barcode output depends on how your card layout and email templates are set up, and on what your Altru version supports. Test it in a sandbox or a test email to yourself, scan it with the same device your admissions staff use, and ask Blackbaud support if you can’t get a barcode to render. If it won’t scan, staff can still look the member up by number, which is slower but workable.
Option 3: Wallet cards on the member’s phone
An emailed PDF or image tends to get buried in an inbox, and members end up scrolling through email at the gate. Apple Wallet and Google Wallet cards solve that: the member taps a link in the email once, the card lives on their phone, and it’s there when they need it. This is the direction most organizations go once their card volume gets big enough that the manual methods hurt.
Details that make or break emailed cards
Clean email addresses
Emailed cards only reach members if Altru has the right address on the right constituent. Duplicate constituents are the usual problem: a member renews online under a new record, and the card goes to an old address or to nobody. Check for duplicates before you switch away from mail.
Households and joint members
Household memberships often have two adults who each want a card. Decide whether both get an email, and make sure the second member actually has an email address on file. Otherwise one person holds every card for the household.
Barcode consistency
Whatever ID the emailed barcode encodes has to match what your admissions process looks up. If you’ve ever reissued cards or changed card numbering, test a few older memberships, not just brand-new ones.
Members who still want plastic
Some members, often longtime ones, will ask for a physical card. Keep a simple way to flag them, such as an attribute or a mailing preference you can filter on in a query, so you can still print the cards they want.
Renewals and upgrades
A new expiration date or level means a new card. Make sure your process sends an updated card on renewal and upgrade, not only when someone first joins. Otherwise members end up showing an outdated card.
A sensible rollout
- Pick the method that matches how the card is used at your gate.
- Send test cards to staff and scan them on the real admissions devices.
- Run a duplicate and missing-email cleanup on active members.
- Start with new members and renewals, and keep printing for anyone who asks.
- Tell members in their welcome or renewal email that their card is coming digitally, so they know to look for it.
Where Social Good fits
If you want wallet cards rather than PDFs, our Digital Membership Cards issue Apple Wallet and Google Wallet membership cards for Altru members, so the card sits on the member’s phone instead of in an email thread. Altru stays where your membership data lives.
Quick answers
Can Altru email a membership card automatically?
Altru’s card features center on printing. Emailing card details through its email tools may be possible depending on your setup, but test it, especially barcodes, before you depend on it.
Do we have to stop mailing cards to send them by email?
No. Most organizations run both for a while and keep physical cards available for members who ask.
