What actually belongs on a membership card
A member card is one of the few things an organisation hands over that people keep in a wallet for years, which is exactly why the wrong seven fields on it are so hard to take back.
Gugus Depan Elang Rimba had four hundred and twenty members on paper, a laminating machine somebody's father had donated in 2019, and a problem nobody had noticed until the district jamboree: at the gate, the checker asked three scouts for their kartu tanda anggota, and all three produced a card that was, technically, correct. Same crest, same layout, same signature block. The trouble was that one of them had left the troop eighteen months earlier and the card still said, in confident block capitals, that he was a member until 2027 - because that is what the card had said on the day it was printed, and a laminated card has no opinion about what happened afterwards.
Nobody was doing anything wrong. That is the part worth sitting with. The card was accurate when it was made, the boy had not forged anything, and the troop secretary had done exactly what troop secretaries do. The card was simply a photograph of a fact that had since changed.
If you're in a hurry
- Designing a KTA is the easy half, and there is a layout guide below if that is genuinely all you came for.
- The hard half is keeping it true. A card that cannot be re-dated or revoked starts lying the moment somebody leaves.
- Seven fields is usually plenty. Most of what people add - blood type, home address, a photo - either does not belong on a card or does not survive the year.
- Printed and digital are not rivals. Print for ceremony, digital for anything anyone checks.
- Whether a card needs verifying at all depends on what it lets you do. If it opens nothing, do not over-engineer it.
What a KTA is actually for
Kartu Tanda Anggota means member identity card, and in Indonesia you will find one in almost every organisation that has ever wanted its members to feel like members - pramuka, koperasi, professional associations, alumni bodies, sports clubs, arisan groups, ormas of every description. They range from a laminated bit of card stock produced at a photocopy shop for Rp 3.000, to a printed PVC card with a hologram that costs closer to Rp 15.000 - 25.000 each in small runs.
Before you design anything, it is worth asking what the card is for, because the answer changes almost every decision after it, and in my experience there are only three honest answers:
| The card is really for… | What it must do | What it does not need |
|---|---|---|
| Belonging. A member wants something in their wallet. | Look good, spell their name right, feel solid | Verification, expiry enforcement, a database |
| Access. It gets you into a venue, a session, a members' rate. | Be checkable at the door by a volunteer in ten seconds | Elaborate security printing |
| Standing. It says you are qualified, registered, insured. | Be verifiable by an outsider, and revocable | To be beautiful, honestly |
Most organisations think they are in the third row and are actually in the first, and there is no shame in that at all - a card that exists so a fourteen-year-old feels like a scout is doing a real job, and it does not need a QR code to do it. Where it goes wrong is when a card built for belonging quietly gets used for access, which is exactly what happened at that jamboree gate.
Hot tip. Ask your committee this one question before you spend anything, and ask it out loud in a meeting rather than in a group chat where people agree too easily: if somebody turned up at the door holding a card we all know is two years out of date, what would actually happen next? If the honest answer is "nothing, we'd let them in", you are building for belonging, and you can stop reading the security half of this article with a clear conscience.
What belongs on the card
Here is the layout I would start from, and I will say up front that the interesting decisions are all about what has been left off rather than what is on it.
The expiry date is the field people leave off most often and regret most reliably. Without it a card makes a permanent claim, which is how Elang Rimba ended up with a former member holding a technically valid document, and with it the card degrades gracefully - it stops being evidence on a known date, whether or not anyone remembers to collect it.
Watch out for. Printing a member's NIK, full home address or date of birth on a card that lives in a teenager's back pocket. It is common, it feels thorough, and it means a lost card hands over enough for somebody to impersonate them elsewhere. If your organisation genuinely needs that data, keep it in your records, not on the card.
What does it actually cost?
This varies enormously by print run and finish, and I would treat the numbers below as the shape of the thing rather than a quote - a printer in Malang and a printer in Kelapa Gading will not agree, and neither will two printers on the same street.
Have a play with the calculator below using your own member numbers. It is arithmetic on your inputs rather than a price list, and the point it makes is not really about money at all - it is about how often you reprint.
Notice the last row. Even at the expensive end, a member card is rarely the thing that breaks a budget - so cost is almost never the real argument between printed and digital. The real argument is the one below.
Printed or digital?
I would rather not pretend this is a clean win either way, because it genuinely is not, and organisations that go all-digital because a blog told them to tend to discover that their members liked the plastic.
| Printed card | Digital card | |
|---|---|---|
| Feels like membership | Yes, genuinely | Less so, whatever we all pretend |
| Works with a flat battery | Yes | No |
| Correct after somebody leaves | No, and cannot be | Yes, immediately |
| Cost to fix a typo | A reprint | Nothing |
| Checkable by an outsider | Only by trusting it | Yes, if you publish a check page |
| Ceremony value at a pelantikan | High | None at all |
Which is why most of the organisations I have watched end up doing both in the end, and not as a compromise between two camps on the committee - they run the two as separate objects that are quietly doing two genuinely different jobs. The printed card gets handed over at the pelantikan with a photograph taken, and it is a keepsake. The digital one is what the person at the gate actually looks at, because it is the only one of the two that knows what happened last month.
How current is your card, really?
Tick honestly. Nobody is scoring this but you, and the questions are all things I have watched go wrong rather than things I invented for a quiz.
The design bit, since that is what most people came for
Fair enough - a good few of the people reading this searched for a card design rather than a lecture about expiry dates, and I would rather give you something usable than pretend that is the wrong question.
- Work at 85.6 × 54 mm with a 3 mm bleed. That is CR80, the bank-card size, and it is what every card printer and every wallet expects.
- Name biggest. The member's name should be the second thing you see after the organisation, and it should be readable at arm's length by somebody in a hurry.
- Leave the bottom right corner alone. That is where a QR goes if you ever add one, and where fingers sit if you do not.
- Dark text on light. Reversed-out white text on a dark photograph looks tremendous on screen and disappears on a cheap printer.
- Number every card, even a laminated one. It costs nothing and it turns "somebody lost a card" into a specific fact.
- Print one and carry it for a week before you order four hundred. This catches more problems than any amount of proofing on screen.
KTA field checklist and layout guide, free, no signup. The seven fields with what each one is for, the CR80 measurements, a what-not-to-print list, and a page for planning your own layout. Take the PDF to print, or the Word version if you would rather edit it.
PDF, 285 KB Word, 12 KBWhat Elang Rimba did in the end
They kept the laminator. The pelantikan card still gets handed over in front of everybody, still gets photographed, and the parents still like it - and I would have argued against them if they had proposed scrapping it, because that card was doing a job that no phone screen does.
What changed is that the gate stopped trusting it. The check at the jamboree is now a scan rather than a look, the card in the wallet is the keepsake, and the answer to "is this person still with us" comes from the same list that says who has paid their iuran - which is the only list that can possibly know.
If you are running an organisation where the card genuinely opens something, that separation is the whole trick, and you can build it with a spreadsheet and a printed list at the gate if you want to. Anggota issues digital member cards with the level and expiry on them, re-dated the moment somebody renews and dead the moment they lapse, alongside the records that make the rest of committee life less painful. You can try it free if that sounds like your problem. And if it does not - if your card exists so a fourteen-year-old can show it to their grandmother - then honestly, buy the nicer card stock and don't give expiry dates another thought.
Common questions
What size should a membership card be?
CR80, which is 85.6 by 54 mm - the same size as a bank card. That is worth sticking to even if you are printing on card stock rather than PVC, because it fits a wallet, a lanyard holder and every cheap card printer without anyone having to think about it. Design with a 3 mm bleed so the trim does not cut into your text.
What should be printed on a member card?
Organisation name, member name, member number, expiry date and a signature cover almost every use. Add rank or role only where it genuinely changes what someone is allowed to do, and a QR code only where something on the other end actually checks it. Five fields do more work than ten.
What should never be printed on a member card?
Home address, date of birth, blood type, phone number and national ID number. Cards get lost, lent and photographed, and none of that data should travel with them. If your organisation needs those details, keep them in your records rather than on the card itself.
How much does a membership card cost to print?
Roughly Rp 3,000 to Rp 25,000 per card, from laminated card stock at the bottom end to printed PVC with a hologram at the top. Small runs sit near the top of that range because the setup cost dominates. The bigger cost is not the first run - it is reprinting for every new member and every correction.
Is a membership card legally required?
No. No Indonesian or Malaysian law obliges an ordinary club, association or student body to issue one. Some parent bodies and some koperasi have their own rules about it, so check upward before you assume, but for most organisations a card is a choice rather than an obligation.
Should we do printed cards or digital ones?
Most organisations end up doing both, and not as a compromise. The printed card is handed over at an induction, photographed and kept, which is the ceremonial job. The digital one is what somebody on the door actually checks, because only one of the two knows what happened last month.
