The NeighborLink Business Card

The business card has a pretty significant role to play in first impressions with people you meet professionally. Just ask this guy (Your Business Card is Crap Guy - video).

At NeighborLink, we aren’t as concerned as that guy about die cuts, tip outs and foil stamping, but we do care about function and design. Our cards needed to look good, present clear contact information, and have more function than just a piece of paper with our name on it. 

We’ve learned over the years that a traditional brochure works great when giving it directly to a recipient but it isn’t something our referring agencies want to hold onto and distribute for us. These referring agencies are the ones who have the first impressions with our soon to be recipients, which required us to think of creative solutions for them in order for our contact info to be distributed.

So, we decided to incorporate basic information about our organization for both recipients and volunteers who may receive this card inside of the card. We give away a lot of cards at NeighborLink due to the high traffic nature of our organization, and this method has worked out really well. It reduces our printing costs and gives enough information to be effective in a person to person interaction. 

We can give the Neighborhood Code Enforcement Department at the City of Fort Wayne a stack of cards, and they can give them to the recipients as they’re giving a list of citations to a homeowner in need. This helps them attempt to close the circle of home maintenance requirements without them having to carry a brochure.

Here are a few pictures of our business cards. 

Right from the beginning, NeighborLink gave it’s Volunteer Coaches who wanted NeighborLink specific business cards with their personal contact info on them a stack of them. This is a great concept, but we always ended up giving our Coaches way more cards than they needed due to the traditional, one-sided press printed cards. Our Coaches need small quantities of cards, not hundreds. 

As you can see in the pictures above, I have a Coach who asked for some cards recently. Our new design allows us to pre-print large quantities of high quality cards and then custom print labels with the relevant contact information of each person that needs them. Brett needed a stack of cards and we’re able to give him 30 cards without having to go back to our printer and order them. 

At the end of the day we’ve reduced the amount of literature we use, we’ve cut production costs, cut turnaround times and reduced the dependency on outside sources to get menial tasks done like creating short-run business card orders. All things vital to a keeping a grassroots nonprofit efficient and effective. It may not be perfect, but it sure works for us.

Ben Swygart at Swygart Studios did another great job taking the concept and designing this card for us. You should check him out if you’re looking for some freelance design help.