Hi
We are in the early stages of researching moving away from paper donor files to a completely electronic system. Has anyone done this? Did you move all the information into Tessitura or somewhere else? Did you look into this and decide to stick with paper?
I am still in the information gathering stage so any information is helpful.
Thanks
Jess Levy
San Francisco Opera
415-565-3283
Hi Jess,
At Seattle Opera, we have gone to a completely electronic donor file and contribution support document filing system. We made the switch first with the contribution support documents and slowly moved all of our donor files to electronic storage.
Support Documents: After contribution entry, we scan the backup documentation in batches equal to the Tessitura batches. Each batch is redacted electronically, we add bookmarks to significant correspondence, and then save the files to a shared network drive. We have a naming convention of P#####_B##### (ei. posting 12345 and batch 54321 would be named P12345_B54321). We have a number of reports/widgets that then have a link to the backup based on the naming convention. We can also manually find and open the backup on the shared drive by finding the batch number on the contribution record. The day after entry each batch is checked to ensure that the backup file exists and we have a spot check for all contributions greater than $1,000.
Donor Files: We used to have cabinets full of paper donor files. Over the course of a couple of months, we had volunteers scan these files into one or two electronic files per donor and save them to donor files on our shared network drive. Going forward we try and upload any significant documents directly to Tessitura in the research documents. Most support documentation remains separately in the files referenced above.
I hope that helps! I'd be more than willing to talk through any aspect of the process with you.
At Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra we've also moved to electronic donor files. We've been using this system for a little less than a year, and it has cut down on the paper significantly. We also scan our batches and save the pdf using the batch number as the files name(Batch 12345), then save that to a shared folder that development and data services can access. We don't save files to Tessitura or the donor's record, but can easily cross reference them by getting the batch number and going to the appropriate folder on the shared drive. Development still keeps some paper files, but all the gift documentation is now saved electronically.