Common Print Your Own Question: What Should I Have On A _______?
by Chelsea Camper | Last Updated December 30, 2015What should you have on a membership card? What should you have on a promotional postcard? What should you have on an invitation?
This is a commonly asked question from people who have just started printing their own forms. The answer is “Whatever you need on there,” which sounds like a pretty vague answer at first. “Whatever you need” means to figure out exactly what you need on whatever you’re printing.
What Do You Need?
Forget about what you’re printing for a moment, get out a scrap piece of paper or a sticky note and jot down all of the things you would need. Think about both what you need from the recipient and what the recipient would need. Let’s first take the example of a promotional postcard.
What the sender needs:
- An address for the recipient
- Your message that you want to convey
- A code or coupon for the recipient to use that can also be tracked by you
- A Call To Action to tell the recipient what to do next
What the recipient needs:
- Proof that the sender is real (address, logo, etc.)
- A way to contact the sender
- A way to use the code or coupon
- Instructions on how to use the code or coupon
Those are just some basic examples. The more complex the “whatever” is, the more things you’ll need to include.
Another example would be a membership card. A membership card is different from a postcard because the membership card will be used multiple times, possibly for more than a year. The membership card distributor will need to be able to verify that the person bringing the card to the organization is the actual member.
What the membership card distributor needs:
- Name of the recipient
- Member ID of the recipient
- Address of the recipient
What the recipient needs:
- Name and location of the membership card distributor
- Member ID to access various member-only sites or places
- A way to contact the membership card distributor
Again, these are just basic examples. Each organization will have different needs and different things that they’ll need to include on their membership cards.
What else do you need besides what you’ve written down? Probably not much else. You can throw in a couple of pretty graphics to catch the recipient’s attention or make their card more unique in a wallet full of cards.
What do you usually print on your “whatever”s when you print your own?
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