A dual or family membership comes with two cardholders, and the welcome or renewal letter should go out with both cards attached. What tends to come out of the printer instead is two letters, one card each, mailed to the same address. That costs postage, confuses the household, and makes the mailing look careless.
The fix is almost never a printer setting. It comes down to the shape of the data you hand to your mail merge: one row per card, or one row per membership.
Why you get one card per letter
When you pull membership card data out of Altru, whether through a membership card process, a letter export, or a membership query, the output usually lists cardholders individually. A dual membership with two named members produces two rows. Word’s mail merge treats every row as a new record, so every row becomes its own page: its own letter, its own card.
To get both cards on one sheet, you need a single row per membership with columns for each cardholder, something like:
- Membership ID, addressee, address lines, membership level, expiration date
- Cardholder 1 name, cardholder 1 card or lookup ID
- Cardholder 2 name, cardholder 2 card or lookup ID
Once the data looks like that, the Word template can place card 1 and card 2 side by side on the same page.
Option 1: Build the data one row per membership
Start from a membership query rather than from individual constituents. Include the membership-level fields (program, level, expiration, primary member, mailing address) and then add the member fields for the people on the membership.
The catch is that members are a one-to-many relationship, so a plain query will still repeat the membership once per member. Depending on your Altru version and permissions, you may be able to limit and pivot that output, or use smart fields to pull specific members into their own columns. If you aren’t sure what your query designer allows for this, test it on a handful of known dual memberships before building the full mailing, or ask Blackbaud support how they recommend returning multiple members in a single row.
Option 2: Reshape the export in Excel
This approach works regardless of what your query can return, which makes it a dependable fallback.
- Export one row per cardholder with the membership ID on every row, plus the name and card ID you print on the card.
- Sort by membership ID, then by whatever decides who is “card 1” (primary member first is the usual choice).
- Number the cardholders within each membership. A helper column with a formula such as
=COUNTIF($A$2:A2,A2)gives 1 for the first cardholder and 2 for the second. - Pivot into columns. A PivotTable, Power Query, or a simple lookup on “membership ID + cardholder number” turns those two rows into one row with Cardholder 1 and Cardholder 2 fields.
- Save that sheet as the mail merge source.
Spot-check the result against a few real memberships. A household with three cardholders, or a single membership that somehow has two rows, will show up here before it shows up in someone’s mailbox.
Setting up the Word template
Card stock that combines a letter with tear-off or peel-off cards on one sheet is common, and the vendor usually publishes a Word template with the card positions already measured. Use it. Hand-measuring card positions invites alignment problems.
- Put the letter merge fields in the letter area as usual.
- In the first card position, insert the Cardholder 1 fields. In the second, insert the Cardholder 2 fields.
- If your barcode is a font, apply the barcode font to the card ID field in both card positions, and check whether it needs start and stop characters.
- Use an IF field on card 2 so single-cardholder memberships print a blank card slot (or a short note) instead of an empty name and broken barcode.
Before you print the whole batch
- Print one page on plain paper and hold it against the card stock to confirm alignment.
- Scan the test barcodes with the same scanner your front desk uses.
- Filter the merge to a few dual memberships, one single, and any household with more than two cardholders, and print those first.
- Decide what happens with a third or fourth cardholder. A common approach is to print the first two on the letter and send extras on a separate card sheet.
Keeping it repeatable
Save the query, the Excel workbook with its formulas, and the Word template together, and write a short note on the order of operations. Card mailings tend to run monthly or with each renewal cycle, and the person running next month’s batch may not be the one who built it. If you change card stock vendors, re-check the template against the new sheet before the next run.
Quick answers
Can Altru put two cards on one letter by itself?
We haven’t seen a reliable built-in option for this, but configurations vary. Check your card and letter processes in a test run, or confirm with Blackbaud support. The data reshaping approach above works either way.
Do I have to use Excel?
Only if your query can’t return both cardholders in one row. If it can, merge straight from the query export.
