Why did someone think it was a good idea to disable document uploads in the Research tab? If it was, in fact, removed because of the Windows Operating System, why are we still able to attach documents in Plans? The operating system doesn't change from tab to tab. Having research documents in two different places on a constituent's record is cumbersome and not very efficient. This needs to change back.
Yes, this is a big, unwanted change. And it was really thrown in at the last second of every training webinar I saw. Has anyone submitted an enhancement request for this? Too much clicking/digging around for some users who, for many years, have been accustomed to finding documents on the Research tab. Now, who knows what isn't being captured.
It has been a few years since we lost the ability to attach documents to Research and have now been using Plans for quite some time. What we did was create a Campaign named "Documents" with no end date and no fiscal year. All of the Plan field selections (Type, Status, Plan Source and Priority) in the Plan are also just named "Documents". We do not add any workers to the Document Plan and we also remove the Start Dt in the Plan so it shows up as the first Plan in the History/Plans screen. We then used Plans Maintenance to uploaded this plan to all of our current Donors so they would have the document plan already created. All documents are attached in that same Document plan in a Constituent's record. For each document a new step is created and of course the document is attached. This actually works better for us than Research did because we can give more detailed information about the document with the large note area.
This also keeps documents all in the same place just like they used to be under Research.
You've built this as a Prospect Campaign? I like this work around, because I can foresee it being a problem in the case of constituents with multiple Plans per FYs in not being able to locate a document.
Thanks for the idea!
Terry,
What have you done with documents that predated Plans? Were you able to transfer them into the plans you created? If you did, how did you do it?
Thanks!
Matt
Matthew,
Unfortunately, we were unable to access them at all while on v12.5 because each time we would try to open them Tessitura would freeze. This was very bad for us at the time. We had access to only those documents someone happened to have a paper backup to refer to or a copy of a document was saved in a computer file somewhere. Now we are on V14.1 and are able to open most of the old Research/Documents if they were originally attached as a PDF. If they were attached as a Word document they still will not open but at least do not freeze up Tessitura. I have notified our Development team, now that we can access some of them, that they can move them to Plans if they want them all in one place. As far as I know though that can only be done one at a time by saving the doc to the computer and attaching to Plans.