Spend just a half-hour in a nonprofit office, and you're likely to be all too familiar with MS Word's mail merge feature — or at least, with the sheets of peel-and-stick mailing labels that can quickly be generated with it!
And where would a nonprofit be, without mail merge to help quickly create those direct mail pieces and personalized newsletters?
But those routine tasks are just the start of many ways that mail-merge can save time and effort in the office.
Take membership cards, for example.
With just the Excel file that holds
your membership data, the mail-merge feature of MS Word,
and a few sheets of business card stock,
creating a custom membership card becomes easy and efficient.
Printable
business card sheets offer a convenient and economical option for creating
your membership cards, and that's the method we'll use in the following tutorial.
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Set up a membership card in MS Word, using a Labels format.
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Select the data source file (your Excel file).
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Place the required mail-merge fields in the card template.
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Merge, preview, check, and print.
We'll show you the steps for creating membership cards with mail merge using MS Word 2019 as the example in this tutorial. Previous versions of
Word and other full-featured word processing programs have similar
functions that can do the same operations. The interface may look a bit
different from that of Word 2019, but the basic steps for mail merging a list and a document are very much the same.
1. Set Up a Membership Card Document
Start up MS Word and open a new blank document.
Under the 'Mailings' tab, click on 'Start Mail Merge' and select 'Labels'.
There are many built-in choices for label printing, and you can also make up your own custom layouts.
For the purposes of this tutorial, we'll be using the Avery 8871 stock. It's an 8½ x 11 inch page of business cards
that snap apart after printing, with a clean smooth edge. Clean edge
and perforated
sheets of business cards, plain or with a preprinted background, are
widely available at office supply stores.
To set your labels to Avery 8871, select 'Avery US Letter' under 'Label Products' and then choose '8871 Clean Edge Business Cards' under 'Product Number'. Click on 'OK.'
The blank document now holds a table, set up to match the printing
requirements for the Clean Edge Business Cards that we've specified.
It's helpful at this point to turn on gridlines for
the table, so you can see where to place the text within the card. To view gridlines, go to the new 'Layout' tab that appears when you create a table, then click on 'View Gridlines'.
In
this example, the only variables will be the first name and last name
of the members —but of course you can expand this idea to customize
your membership cards for different levels of membership, locations,
expiry dates, or any other variables that are included as fields in
your membership database.
In laying out the card, I find it useful to type in a real name as placeholder text,
just to get a better sense of the finished layout. When the layout is
done, just delete any placeholder text and replace it with the
proper merge fields.
Tip:
This would be a good time to save the document as a Word template, in
the same folder as your other Word templates. The next time you need to
print membership cards, you'll be able to open a new document based on
this template and pick up from this point on. If you wait until the
database has been selected and connected to the file, changing to
another list in the future can be needlessly complicated. Save a template,
and use that every time you want to print cards with an updated database
file.
2. Attach the Data File
Go back to the 'Mailings' tab and click on 'Select Recipients' menu, then choose the 'Use an Existing List' option.
Browse
your computer to find and select the Excel file that holds your membership database.
Now you'll want to insert the necessary merge fields into your membership card document.
Highlight the placeholder text that contains the first name, click on 'Insert Merge Field' and select the field that contains the first name data. Do the same with the placeholder text that contains the last name. Make sure you've left a space between the two fields or
they'll run together into one word when the cards are generated.
Click 'Update Labels' to copy these merge fields to the rest of your cards.
This will replicate the one card you've made, filling out
the page of cards — and as many other pages as you'll need to print
cards for all the members. Click 'Preview Results' and suddenly all those merge fields are filled out with your members' names.
Take a moment to look at the cards you've designed, and decide if you need to make any last-minute changes to the layout.
If so, make your changes to that first original card and hit 'Update Labels' once again to automatically update the rest of them.
3. Complete the Mail Merge
At this point, all of your cards will have the same formatting, but you may choose to customize the font size or spacing of some individual cards, based on how the names fit onto the card.
To do this, click on 'Finish & Merge' and select 'Edit Individual Documents'. This will open up a new Word document where you'll be able to review each card and make any necessary changes.
Once you're done editing, save the membership card pages to your hard drive as a Word
document — and that's it. You're ready to print!
A Digital Alternative to Mail Merging
If you're trying to be more environmentally friendly — or maybe you're just tired of dealing with printer jams and wasting an entire sheet of label paper every time a new member joins — you may be interested in an all-digital alternative to printed membership cards.
Everything is done digitally these days anyway and most members prefer the ease of having everything they need right on their smartphones.
That's why WildApricot has the option to create digital membership cards in a matter of a few clicks.
All you have to do is select a template, choose what fields you want displayed and each of your members will be equipped with a shiny new membership card that they can access and display directly from their smartphone.
Best part? You don't even have to import any Excel files because the membership cards will be automatically connected to your WildApricot membership database. That means you and your members can both edit their membership or contact information and it will automatically be updated on their digital membership cards.
And yes, if they really want to, your members can still print their membership cards through your WildApricot website's member portal.
If this sounds intriguing, start a free 30-day trial of WildApricot right now and head over to this blog post to learn how to set up your digital membership cards in more detail.