We are looking to change our membership cards to permanent plastic ones (rather than the flimsy paper-ish ones we had been printing).  Therefore, we are outsources the bulk of our cards but are looking at purchasing a card printer for the cards that will still need to be done in-house.  Does anyone have any suggestions/recommendations/cautions about this process and I would also appreciate any information on the various card printers & software that you may have experience with.

 THANKS!

DeDe -

I undertook this at my previous position. You could probably find a local print vendor to help you with you needs, but I worked with Karen Mareb at Winbrook in Billerica MA. (800-252-4744 x637). We got our thermal printer for in-house needs from Peter Caliri (781-843-7209 x105) -- I can't recall the company name. It was a pretty big endeavor for us to convert about 20,000 households to this new card, but with a few bumps it all worked out. I don't recall the specific software that was needed to have the thermal card printer work, but I believe it came as part of the package with the printers.

Our biggest stumbling block was making sure we exported the right info for the barcoding to the printer (I'm assuming you are going the barcoded route). Thankfully, we had them overnight us a few test cards before doing the whole run, and we caught this error before going to the full print -- we had the wrong field so the barcodes meant nothing. It was also important to test that the barcodes on the new cards were readable by our scanners.

I would think carefully about what is involved with brining this process in-house. Doing fulfillment on a weekly basis in-house was fairly time consuming, but we were unable (at the time) to find a mailhouse that worked with thermal card printers for the relatively small weekly volume that we would have, so we didn't have many options.

 Feel free to message me if you have further questions: Marla_Strickland@pem.org

We went to permanant membership cards a few years ago.  We use a zebra printer inhouse to print out cards for new members and we had Miles Printing on Plastics print the cards for us.  We mailed thenew cards out to everyone who had more than 8 months left of membership.  It's been a relatively cost efficient system and has worked quite well.  We added a "request new cards" check box on our front desk membership forms. 

The only real problem that we have is that they do not have expiration dates.  People get confused.  I try to include expiration dates to the right of their names on all museum mailings.