Very beneficial and helpful

Our desired behavior is to print plastic membership cards thru a local printer dedicated to that purpose. An example is to use the Evolis Pebble 4 or the Evolis Tattoo 2.  These are label printers (one card at a time) but we need to print in batches too.  Our application is to print member related text on a pre-printed card.

http://www.evolis.com/eng/Products/Card-printers

Very much needed feature!! 

YES absolutely!!! I'd like to see this VERY much.

For us it does not have to be complicated: First & Last name and date of expiration and  a place to put our logo and a bit of custom text...

 A great side effect of doing it this way is that it ensures people who consider themselves members who are part of a bundle are actually signed up. I know it seems that people would of course sign up up but once the company signs up and they have the card their bundle administrator gave them, we lose track of them. This would force them to interact with our website at least once a year!

As WA is still deciding whether to roll out this feature, Has anyone comeup with a workaround to get cards online with membership info filled out?

I could post a blank card template in the members only section, BUT i wondered if anyone knows of third party software that would do the merge for me so that we could post  the cards online already merged? I don't see mail merge being the answer for saving individual cards and posting them... unless I'm missing something in it's features.

Meagan 

Well after many years with WA this is something now we really "must have" to keep productivity going. Unfortuantly we have begun the processes of "looking around" to better fit our needs as we started this so many years ago.

Members being able to print/access things instantly is top priority for us, as we offer insurance and our members need "proof".

Also not having a affiliate program after years and years on our "must have" have list has also pushed us to start searching for new membership software.

We currently have 3 WA sites and really do not wish to change. As a loyal customer we simply need to know that something SOON will be done.

I understand that the needs of "All WA" customers are important but this has been something many many many have asked for...

Any feedback, any suggestions, Anything at all is welcomed!

Kim,

As you know we have released many updates over the last few years - and we intend to keep our pace. All the items are scheduled based on the balance of many factors, primarily driven by how many clients request a particular feature - then also by how hard to implement it. This one is pretty high in terms of client requests but also requires very substantial development effort. We are currently researching ways to solve this need.

The affiliate program has a separate thread - that one is a different challenge - actually defining what exactly is to be implemented. 

Can you give us an idea of the timeline for this feature since you are planning 2010????

 PLEASE see if you can add this to the definite updates of this year.... We really NEED this feature!

Happy New Year!

We have been doing research on this and have not found a definitive solution yet. We definitely expect to address this within 2010 but we do not have a precise timeline yet. We will post updates here as we have more information.

Note that we are trying to address a broader issue first - generating labels - which applies to contacts, members, event registrants etc.  We will most  probably not release a solution for each area within 2010 - but once the overall issue is solved, we should be able to progress quickly on remaining details.

We have made this one of our Top 50 features for 2010. We hope to start development within the next 12 months.

As you can imagine, this is a complex issue, especially since we want it to be simple to use and also functional on as many computer platforms as possible. We'll let you know the results of our analysis and its release date as soon as we can.

As always, keep the ideas, uses, and suggestions coming.

YES!!!!! We are So glad to hear that! Thank you Thank you Thank you!!!!

Kind Regards,
Meagan Forney


Boulder Green Building Guild (BGBG)
Administrative Assistant/ Member Manager




 

Just adding my vote for this ability - we need name tags and membership cards.

Thanks for your efforts!

It would be good to have mailing labels.--any of the smaller sizes--we can adjust

Or be able to choose what data is exported rather than needing to export all the data and delete it.

 Teri

OFLA

I'd like to also add to this badge issue that this would be a very important and useful feature.  We also would use the avery label size already quoted by others and the fields we'd like to see would be just name and company name. 

I'd recommend if you set this up that you allow us to also insert a logo or image in the badge printing template along with the ability to define what fields will print on the badge from the fields offered in the database and where on the badge the logo/image and field can be inserted.  Flexibility is important with this area.

Understood, thanks.

We do want to provide this flexibility so researching a way to do this. 

This would be a very useful feature to us as well.  Either a membership card (business card size) or a certificate would suffice for us.  Must include member name and expiration date as well as a spot to insert a logo.  The Members should be able to go on line and print off their own card.

Thanks!

I would love the ability to print name badges directly from WA.  This feature would save me hours of work each week, or at least it would save my interns hours of work each week. :-) 

 Thank you,

Justin

In reading through the 44 comments on this thread, I don't see how any single solution can meet the needs of all users.  Every one of the membership or event cards or name badges is unique.  And that's only from the folk who have commented on this thread!  I suspect this requirement could only be met by a much more general solution than has been suggested so far. 

There is already a general purpose tool that is designed to do exactly this sort of thing - the Mail/Merge product from Microsoft.  This only requires;

1. Excel or other delimited file for input to Word, and
2. That the file have the same physical format every time it's used.
   

However, Wild Apricot fails to meet both these requirements -

1. the XML file produced by the Export process cannot be used as an input to MSWord Match/Merge (without being changed to a .xcl or  delimited text file).
   
2. The column format of an exported file changes with each Wild Apricot software upgrade and as membership fields are added or removed..  If there is a different number of columns in the input file than are expected by the Match/Merge process, it fails rather spectacularly.

If it were not for these two limitations, Match/Merge could solve every (?) requirement on this thread.  I have solved these problems for my membership cards by writing a perl script that creates a tab delimited file from a WA membership "Export All" XML file.  This script creates a tab delimited text file with the same column format irrespective of format of the file exported from WA.

It should not be terribly difficult to overcome these two limitations.  There is already an "Advanced Search" feature which allows us to extract a specific set of rows in the database (well, almost, see below **).  The "Advanced Search" feature needs to be upgraded in two ways:

1. The ability to specify which columns are to be selected.  This would allow us to use the same Match/Merge process each time a particular job is run irrespective of any changes to the WA database structure.
2. The option to export a file in tab delimited format so that it can be read directly into the MS Match/Merge or any other similar facility.
   

With these two changes we have a one click solution to creating file that can be fed into Match/Merge which can then be used to create every card/label/badge described on this thread.  Since the "Advanced Search" can be saved for future use it becomes a quickly reusable tool.  

** The one area where Advanced Search falls down (for me) is in date processing.  For a search that uses dates to be re-usable, there must be options to specify dates in a format such as "Day X thru Y of this month" and "Day X thru Y of last month".  The this month/last month feature allows this search to operate predictably month after month.  With this feature I could produce membership cards each month by re-useing a search that selects all members whose "Renewal Date Last Changed" date is for "Day 1 through 31 of last month".
(I know I've made this suggestion on another thread so please excuse the duplication.)

Gordon,

 Excellent comment, your input is very much appreciated.

You are totally right about this particular feature having so many different aspects and details. This, coupled with a technical challenges of building basically a web-based analog of Microsoft mail merge (especially the layout functionality) is why we have not solved this yet.

Your point about tweaking WA to make Microsoft mail merge is well taken. We are right now redesigning our import function from the ground up and it will support other formats (probably XLS and CSV). Once this launches in 3.5 (~June 2010), we can do something about the export too.

The points about selecting the export columns and about date selection (which really boils down to introducing custom date fields) are noted and they are indeed on our radar. Date type field is one of the candidates for version 3.6 

Agree with this approach. Much better idea than trying to reinvent the mail-merge wheel and ending up producing something that doesn't meet everyones/anyones needs.

Regards,
Ian
worthing and adur chamber of commerce

As the orginator of this (see 1st email after wa) I think this has totally gone in another direction??? then what I said I was looking for...

"Ideally we are looking for something so members can print their membership certificate and/or card right online, either in their account center or somewhere in the members only section"

Though the ideas/feedback are great here. The truth is still after 3 years I see nothing saying this is going to be done.

It is now great that we can "export" them into a excel ...etc...and do a few other things so we can CONTINUE to do this all ourselfs by hand....BUT it truly does not help us with productivity or streamlining our customer service so members can actually get things themselves like cards, certificates etc.

I do (as I've said many times) understand its had to find something that fits all needs.

But what I started here so many many years ago still has not been addressed.

When the members go into their account I would like them to be able to print their own custom stuff. Bottom line.

I've seen this in hundreds of websites, and yes membership websites and I simply dont want to sound like a broken record here....

So with that...I just wanted to show that this has gone way off track....to the first email I sent...

My last attempt (before changing membership programs) will be to try to contact some of Wild apricots partners I've seen somewhere on this site to see if they can actually customize the members profile like we need it.

We too are concerned that the idea that membership cards can be printed from the profiles of our members is still under considerateion by WA and hopefully coming soon.

Last week I sent a mailing to all of our members with their cards. We spent quite a lot of money and time on this mailing and clearly see that this is NOT a workable solution for us each year as we grow.

I too have seen MANY websites from insurance companies to other member organizations where you print your valid card online.

There has to be a more cost/time effective way for people to get a membership card! Kim- if you find an elegant work around we are all ears because we simply can't keep up with the cost and administration of mailing cards. 

I think that Kim's call for a way for members and others printing cards online is a good one and got me thinking about the blast email and membership confirmation emails as a vehicle for providing these.

 I have a membership level I use for test purposes and used this to format a membership card at the bottom of the membership confirmation email.  I customized it using a logo and a few macro keywords * and reduced the font size to 8pt. 

It produces an image containing personalized information for the member and looks very much like the membership cards I print and mail to my membership.

Given the quality of home printers and the availability of card stock at member's homes, the results are  a bit unpredictable but that is true of any home printing solution. 

 There is one glitch I can see with this approach in that not all macro fields are available to all email types.  For instance, {Member_Renewal_Date} is available on the membership confirmations emails but it is not provided for blast emails.  But apart from this limitation I'd think that virtually any label or card could be personalized and formatted in this way. 

* By "Macro Keywords" I mean the personal data in squiggly brackets such as
{Contact_First_Name}, etc which can be plugged into the various email types.