Count up the paper behind one membership: a printed card, a welcome packet, a renewal letter or three, maybe a lapse notice, plus the envelopes and postage for all of it. Multiply by your member count and you can see why “go paperless” keeps coming up at budget time, not just at sustainability meetings.
The good news is that most of that paper is optional. The catch is that the cards themselves are usually the last thing people mail, and you can’t drop them until your door process works without them. So it helps to work in a particular order.
Start with the data, not the cards
A paperless program only reaches members you can email. Before changing anything, find out how many you can actually reach.
- Pull a query of active memberships showing the primary member, any additional cardholders on the membership, and whether each has an email address on their constituent record.
- Look at households. Family memberships often have one email for the whole household. That’s fine for renewal notices, but decide now whether every adult cardholder should get their own card electronically, or whether one email to the primary member is enough.
- Clean up duplicates and bad addresses. If the same person exists twice in Altru, one record will have the email and the other will have the membership. Fix those before you start relying on email for anything important.
- Collect email at every point of sale. Make it a required field on online membership forms if you can, and train desk staff to ask for it on every in-person join or renewal.
The share of members without a usable email is your paper floor. That group will keep getting mail no matter what, so the goal is to shrink it, not to pretend it isn’t there.
Move renewals to email first
Renewal mailings are usually the biggest paper cost and the easiest to change. A common approach:
- Send the first two or three renewal reminders by email only.
- Run a query just before the final notice goes out for members who haven’t renewed and either have no email or have never opened your renewal emails (if your email tool reports that).
- Mail paper only to that smaller list.
Altru’s own communication tools can handle parts of this, and many organizations run renewal email through a separate email platform fed by an Altru query. Either way, keep the same query logic so the mail list and the email list never overlap by accident.
Give people a way to opt back into paper
Some members want a physical card, a letter they can put on the fridge, or simply don’t use email much. Pick one consistent place in Altru to record that preference, such as a constituent attribute or a solicit code your team already uses, and build it into every mailing query. When someone calls asking for paper, the desk should be able to set it in under a minute.
Being clear that paper is still available also takes the edge off the change. Members are much more relaxed about “we’ve gone digital” when it comes with “just ask if you’d prefer a printed card.”
Replace the plastic card last
Members bring cards to the door so staff can confirm they’re current. To drop the card, you need another reliable way to do that:
- Name lookup at the desk. Works for a small site, but it’s slow when a line forms and depends on spelling.
- A card on the member’s phone. A digital card in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet shows a barcode your staff can scan the same way they would a printed card, and the member doesn’t have to find an email or log in anywhere.
- A printed confirmation at join. For people who join at the desk and want something right away, a receipt that shows the member name and expiration can cover the first visit.
Before you stop printing, check how your barcodes and card numbers are set up in Altru and confirm a scanned digital card resolves to the right membership. Test it on a handful of real member records in a sandbox or with staff memberships before switching everyone over. If you’re unsure how Altru generates card numbers for your programs, Blackbaud support can confirm it for your configuration.
Don’t forget the smaller paper
Once cards and renewals are handled, look at the rest: printed welcome packets (a welcome email with a link to member benefits does the same job), paper acknowledgments for membership gifts, benefit coupons that could be codes instead, and printed member event invitations. Each one is a smaller saving, but together they add up, and they’re easy to change once members are used to hearing from you by email.
Track whether it’s working
Keep it simple. Each quarter, count the members on your paper mailing lists and the share of active members with an email on file. Note how many people ask for a printed card. If the paper list keeps shrinking and renewal rates hold steady, the program is working. If renewals dip, look first at members who lost their mailed notices without a working email replacing them.
Where Social Good can help
If the printed card is what’s keeping you on paper, our Digital Membership Cards put Altru membership cards into Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, so members carry their card on their phone and you can stop printing and mailing plastic for everyone who opts in.
