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Printing and Scanning Membership Cards

Tom Brown (Past Member)
$organization

We are looking at putting Barcodes on our Member Cards and want to scan them with N-Scan for special area access.  (This is a feature or N-Scan 6.x)

Wondering if anyone else is doing something like this.

If you are we would love to hear:

1. What style Barcode are you using.  (Code 39, Code 128, Something else, I don't know)

2. How are you printing new member cards?  (Our Mail House, does this,  We do it internally, something else.)

3. If you are printing your own cards.  How are you doing this?

  • What Printer
  • Software
  • Layout of Barcode

How successful has this all been for you?

 

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  • $organization
    Hi Tom,

    The Science Museum of Minnesota started putting barcodes on membership cards quite a few years ago. This was before Ron Wilson worked for the Network, but he had helped us with Nscan installations, and generously gave me some guidance.

    1. We are using barcode 39. I think we mostly did that because it was easy; Ron said "I can just send you an email with the file," and I said "Sounds great!"


    2. We print cards several different ways. My program does most of them through a mailhouse, but we do some on-site as well. Our smaller, higher-level donor program prints all their cards on-site.


    3. We can laser our cards on any old printer you want, as far as I've found. We just print straight out of Word.Our Development group prints on a special printer, but that's because they use the fancy 30 mil cards that are like credit cards, which require a special printer. But I believe they are still right out of MS Word. We just have an extra merge field to insert the ID number again and code it in the barcode font.


    I'm not sure what you mean by the layout of the barcode....do you mean where it sits on the card? Let me know and I can answer this as well.


    We are not using this to scan live into Tessitura, ironically; it's more for cash control at our parking ramp, and is used by our store and food vendors to verify member discounts based on a current member list that is sent to them on a regular basis. We just haven't taken that next step. That said, this has worked very well for us. The only challenge is making sure that the barcode doesn't rub off the membership card at all. We had problems with that initially and my mailhouse vendor increased the temperature on his printer to fix it. It's much better now, but we are also (hopefully) going to switch to a higher-quality membership card stock that will eliminate the few people per day who have an unreadable barcode on their card.

    Two notes:

    1) Font 39 is great, because it's literally just a font in Word. You don't need any special software. What you DO need is to put an asterix on each side of the barcode, or it will look like a barcode but it won't read correctly. That one had us stumped for awhile. Also: make sure to test your scanners on your cards. Is the barcode large enough for the scanner to read? Is the card so shiny that it just reflects the laser? Test before you make any big investments.

    2) You need a plan in case someone has lost or forgotten their membership card. Our box office prints temp cards, which can be shown if a normal card is not available. They literally just print a card on a boca ticket stock - nothing that requires anything fancy from the Box Office staff.

    Let me know if you have other questions.

    Beth


    ​​
    Five amazing films. One amazing world. Omnifest 2015, a giant screen film festival featuring four classics and one brand new film, runs from January 9 through February 19 in the Science Museum of Minnesota's William L. McKnight-3M Omnitheater. Visit www.smm.org/omnifest to plan your visit today!

    Elizabeth A Varro
    Director of Membership
    Science Museum of Minnesota
    (651) 265-9829

    From: "Tom Brown" <bounce-tombrown3568@tessituranetwork.com>
    To: evarro@smm.org
    Sent: Thursday, February 5, 2015 2:56:23 PM
    Subject: [Tessitura Development Forum] Printing and Scanning Membership Cards

    We are looking at putting Barcodes on our Member Cards and want to scan them with N-Scan for special area access.  (This is a feature or N-Scan 6.x)

    Wondering if anyone else is doing something like this.

    If you are we would love to hear:

    1. What style Barcode are you using.  (Code 39, Code 128, Something else, I don't know)

    2. How are you printing new member cards?  (Our Mail House, does this,  We do it internally, something else.)

    3. If you are printing your own cards.  How are you doing this?

    • What Printer
    • Software
    • Layout of Barcode

    How successful has this all been for you?

     




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  • $organization in reply to Beth Varro

    Hi Beth, 

    I'm interested in knowing what kind of printer your development team prints on for membership cards. At Pacific Symphony, we're currently using a member card that's made of card-stock like material and I'm looking to get us using something a little nicer. We're just sticking these templates into the manual feed of a normal printer but we'd eventually like to get away from doing this. 


    Thanks!

    Chris

Reply
  • $organization in reply to Beth Varro

    Hi Beth, 

    I'm interested in knowing what kind of printer your development team prints on for membership cards. At Pacific Symphony, we're currently using a member card that's made of card-stock like material and I'm looking to get us using something a little nicer. We're just sticking these templates into the manual feed of a normal printer but we'd eventually like to get away from doing this. 


    Thanks!

    Chris

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