The number in a member card’s barcode is easy to overlook while you’re designing the card. It starts to matter once the cards are printed and people are using them at the gate. Altru gives you more than one identifier to choose from, and the two that come up most are the constituent’s lookup ID and the membership ID. Each one points to something different. The right choice depends on what you need the scan to tell you.
What each ID actually identifies
The lookup ID belongs to the person. It’s on the constituent record and stays with that person whether they’re a member, a donor, a one-time ticket buyer, or all three. It doesn’t care which membership they hold or whether they hold one at all.
The membership ID belongs to the membership. It identifies the membership itself: the level, the term, the people attached to it. On a household or dual membership, several people share one membership, so they share the same membership ID.
That difference drives everything else. A lookup ID answers “who is this?” A membership ID answers “which membership is this?” At the door, what you usually need to know is “is this person allowed in today, and under what benefits?” Neither ID answers that by itself. Whatever reads the barcode still has to look up the current status.
The case for encoding the membership ID
- Status lives on the membership. Active, lapsed, level, expiration date, and guest allowances all belong to the membership, so validating a membership ID goes straight to the answer.
- Household cards behave predictably. Everyone on the membership scans to the same membership, which is usually what front-line staff expect.
- A lapsed membership reads as lapsed. The scan doesn’t have to work out which of a person’s memberships is the current one.
The case for encoding the lookup ID
- It identifies the individual. If you want to know which household member came in, not just that the membership was used, a person-level ID gets you there.
- It survives membership changes. A member who upgrades, downgrades, or moves from an individual to a family membership keeps the same lookup ID. A card built on it may not need reprinting.
- It works beyond membership. The same identifier can tie a visit to the constituent’s donations, purchases, and communications history.
The tradeoff is that a lookup ID scan has to resolve the person to a membership. If someone is on two memberships (say, their own and a grandparent’s), or none, the scanning tool needs a clear rule for what to show.
The question to settle before you print
Find out what happens to the membership ID over a member’s lifetime in your setup. In particular: does it stay the same through a renewal, an upgrade, or a lapse followed by a rejoin? We’d rather not guess here, because the answer can depend on how your programs and transactions are set up. Test it in a sandbox or on a staff test record: create a membership, renew it, upgrade it, let one lapse and rejoin it, and write down the ID at each step. If Blackbaud support can confirm the behavior for your configuration, even better.
If the membership ID changes on any of those events, every card encoded with it goes stale at that moment. Plastic cards then need reprinting. That isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker, but you should know about it before you order cards in bulk.
Practical rules that save trouble later
- Choose based on what your scanner can look up. The best ID in theory is useless if your scanning tool can’t validate it against live Altru data. Confirm first, design second.
- Don’t encode names, levels, or expiration dates. Anything printed into the barcode is frozen. Encode an ID and let the scan pull current details.
- Keep member barcodes distinguishable from ticket barcodes. If the same scanner handles both, check that a membership barcode can’t be mistaken for a ticket number, and vice versa. A consistent prefix or format is a common way to do it.
- Use the same ID everywhere. Printed cards, replacement cards, and mobile wallet cards should all carry the same identifier type. Otherwise staff end up with two kinds of “valid” card that behave differently.
- Plan for lost cards. Decide whether a replacement card gets the same barcode or a new one, and whether the old one should stop working. Your choice of ID affects how easy that is.
- Run a test batch at the actual gate. Print a handful of cards, scan them on the devices staff will use, in the lighting they’ll scan in, before the full run.
A sensible default
For most museums, gardens, and zoos, admission is the job of the barcode, so the membership ID is usually the more natural fit, as long as your testing shows it stays stable through renewals or you’re comfortable reissuing cards when it changes. If you need visits tracked per person within a household, or your members change levels often, the lookup ID is worth the extra resolution logic.
Scanning with Social Good
Our Ticket Scanner scans Altru tickets and membership barcodes at the door on mobile devices. Altru stays the place where membership data lives. If you’re deciding which ID to put on new cards, it’s worth confirming how your scanner will read them before the cards are printed.
