Hi all,

Is anyone out there creating membership cards directly from Patron Edge, and if so, how are you going about doing it?  We are trying to find some way in which we could create membership cards immediately at our box office as members join or renew.

We're currently running Patron Edge integrated with Raiser's Edge.  Right now we collect the membership information on a paper form, which is sent to a separate off-site office where a membership staff person verifies the data and generates membership cards through Raiser's Edge, which are then sent to the member via US Mail.

My ideal would be that when a member comes to our admission desk to buy or renew a membership, we would enter / verify the data into PE, complete the sale, and immediately print out a barcoded membership card through PE that could be given to the customer right on the spot.  Right now, due to latency in the PE - RE synchronization process, and because an RE membership number for new memberships isn't available until the sync process completes, we can't do something like this.

Has anyone else been down this road, and if so, what'd you find?

Thanks,

Craig

This can definitely be done through PE. When creating your membership in Administration, there is a Ticket Format field. Design a 'Subscrption Ticket' through Document Design as you would any other document, set up the sales point printing, print options, etc. Then attach this design to the membership.  If you're using a specialized membership card printer, you will probaby want to set up the document as Generic Windows in Doc Design, or if you know your way around Crystal you could create a membership card in that format.

Nicholai

Nicholai,

Very cool; thanks for the info, and I'll give that a go!

It's funny; I'm part of a "Membership Task Force" that has been set up here to review the problems that we've been having with Patron Edge and its integration with Raiser's Edge.  Upon review and deeper analysis, most of the issues have essentially boiled down to our own internal organizational "policy / process / procedure" (PPP) issues, rather than actual issues with the products themselves.

If I'd provide any caution or advice to others reading these forums and considering implementing PE, it'd have to be "Really, really, really define, understand and map out your current PPPs before doing anything in PE; give yourself plenty of time to test your implementation before going live wide-scale; and RTFM as much as you can before implementation."  Pretty standard advice, I realize, but like in a lot of organizations, it seems that the orders comes down more or less as "Ready!  Fire!  Aim!" 

Just in going through the User Guides for PE, I've come across a number of useful features that already exist in PE, and which we could have been making good use of, but that we didn't know existed and/or never made the commitment to properly understand, configure and use (Actions, for example.)  As we gain more experience and knowledge with the product, we find better ways of using it...but doing so successfully is more time-consuming and requires more focus than at lot of folks in the organization realize.

Anyway, thanks for the tip; I appreciate it!  Also, I haven't had time to provide much in the way of feedback or comments, but I'm diggin' The Spotlight; nice to see a PE-specific blog, and the info in it has been interesting and useful.

Best,

Craig

Hi Nicholai,

We have been working on a solution for this issue as well.

We do not print barcodes on our Membership Cards but we do print the Membership Number generated by RE.  Can the 'Subscription Ticket' design include this number? In other reports we do not have access to this number within PE.

Also, do you have a recommendation for handling the time difference created by the sync between RE and PE.  We are considering asking the patron to return to the box office after their visit.

Thank you for your ideas.

Dan

We don't have a way currently to get any RE fields into PE, so we wouldn't be able to pull that into the doc design unless a custom sync was built to push the RE number back into PE after the membership has synched (because we don't yet have an RE membership record until the sync happens).  Since there is that time difference, I don't think a custom sync would be right for your organization.

What several places do is issue a temporary membership card (generally a card printed on ticket stock or a special receipt) so the member can get in the same day.  Then they either ask the member to stop back by the admissions desk when she leaves to pick up her new card (it would have synched and been printed from RE by that time), or have her hold on to the temporary card and issue a real card by mail.

I can only speak to the ideas that I've heard from clients, however; hopefully some more organizations will describe their processes in this forum to give you more food for thought.

On the PE CRM record, we populate the RE membership ID# in the User Definable 10 field.  Hope that helps