Membership Cards

You can provide members with physical or virtual membership cards that can be used for checking-in to sessions.

You can print individual membership cards for members on either premium paper or PVC plastic, which includes (optional) photo identification and a barcode that can be used for attendance tracking.

Alternatively, members can save / print their membership card through their online account, or open it on their mobile device for check-in purposes.

Generating Membership Cards

You can generate a membership card for a member by visiting their profile and clicking on the "Card" button in the left sidebar.

The membership card includes a barcode that can be used with any barcode scanner to check-in members without entering their PIN code.

Printing Membership Cards

You have two options when printing memberships cards, aside from regular paper -

Using glossy paper with any compatible printer
Printing on PVC plastic cards

Using glossy paper is pretty straightforward - send the card to the printer and later cut out the card.

Printing on PVC cards gives a more premium feel and has more durability, however it typically requires specialized, expensive printers to produce. Fortunately, there is a more affordable method to print PVC cards, using Inkjet printers that have a media disc printing tray.

PVC Card Printing

We prepared the following guide for PVC printing using common, relatively inexpensive printers for your convenience. Note that we cannot provide technical support for operating printers, and that the process is more involved than regular printing.

Certain Inkjet printers are equipped with a media tray for printing on compact discs. While those are no longer common in use, the media tray can be reused for printing on PVC cards using the appropriate tray.

What you'll need:

An Inkjet printer with a media tray for compact disc cover printing
A PVC card tray for your printer
PVC cards

Brainstorm ID is a company that manufactures such trays for several lines of Inkjet printers. You can also find similar PVC printer trays on Amazon. For the purpose of this guide, we will be using a Canon PIXMA TS8220 printer, but the process will be similar with any printer that can support a PVC card tray.

Once you have all of the components mentioned above, you can start the printing process:

Follow your printers' instructions for preparing the card tray. If you purchased a tray from Brainstorm ID (mentioned above), they also provide video tutorials on their website for each of their trays. With the printer we are using in this guide, you should load two PVC cards into the tray (even if you are only printing one at a time). Do not insert the tray yet.
Go to the membership card page from the member profile, and click on the print icon.
Change the media type to "Printable Disc" in the print settings. In most browsers, this will require you to open the system printer dialog instead of the simplified browser one. Here's how to get there on Chrome:

Once you are there, select your Inkjet printer and click on "Preferences". Set the media type to "Printable Disc", the paper source and printer paper size to "Multi-purpose tray" (those values might be slightly different depending on your printer). It should look like this:

Click on "Ok" to confirm, and you are ready to print. Click on "Print" in the dialog to start the printing process.
With the Canon PIXMA TS8220 printer, you will need to wait for the printer to ask you to insert the tray. Follow the instructions on the printer and insert the tray when requested.
After inserting the tray and pressing "OK", the printing process will start. Sometimes the printer will stop and ask to insert the tray again after seemingly doing nothing - just follow the instructions and re-insert the tray.
And that's it! You should have a professional looking PVC membership card. It might seem somewhat involved, but once you do it once it's relatively straightforward. You might need to adjust the margins on the printing areas a couple of times before it comes out dead center on the card.

Exporting the card and managing printing yourself

You can also save the membership card as an image, and manage printing using your preferred printing software which might have more options better suited to the printer you have on hand. To save the card, click on the image icon above the membership card layout.

If you are using their trays, Brainstorm ID provides a PDF generator that can accept multiple cards at once. You can save the cards as images and load it into the generator if you'd rather print out multiple cards at once.