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Hello,
Since we opened our doors over 30 years ago, we have maintained a paper file for each of our high level donors. There are close to 1,000 files and they are filled with copies of every thank you letter and bill we’ve ever mailed, as well as correspondence from the donor, newspaper articles, etc., etc. We would like to scan the contents of each file and attach it to their Tessitura file under the Research/Documents tab. And as a result, minimizing or completely doing away with all of the paper files.
What do other organizations do with their donor’s communications? Has anyone else tackled a project like this? I would imagine space would become an issue for Tessitura?
I would think the best way – although the most time consuming – would be to scan each item separately so it can be individually titled in the notes field. It would be nice to have another column available so we could categorize the type of document (i.e. Acknowledgments, Accounting, Stewardship, etc), but I think if we standardized how we used the notes field, it would work for sorting purposes.
Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated!!
Thank you in advance!!
I've recently started doing this with PDFs or Docs of the pledge forms and/or letters of intent for major gifts and PowerPoints converted to PDFs of major presentations - we have a similar paper file system, we keep the last 5 years in cabinets and the rest in storage facilities offsite. I spoke to the IT department when I began attaching them and like Martin they had concerns about storage and database speed.
I agree with digitizing each document separately. You'll also want to brainstorm your categories before you start - it's good for your nomenclature to be flexible, but if you're going to be sorting by categories you don't want everything to be a class of it's own. You'll also want some sort of standard naming convention.
Talk to your IT department, but I think the better solution for this project would be outside of Tessitura on a shared server space - with frequent back-ups!
I did some prep work for a similar project I suggested (and will keep suggesting) here. If you're interested I'll share the folder structure and naming conventions I drafted.
Cheers,
Jim
Similar to Jim's suggestion, you could save all the research documents to a specific shared location on your network, and then attach to the constituent record a document that just contained links to the actual documents. So any given person might have a handful of documents attached, each being a list of links to all the actual docs of various types. That way you could still get to it from the constituent record if desired, without having to have all of it actually in the database.
Thank you all for your suggestions!! Our IT Dept doesn't seem to be worried about the space issue, but I do hope that version 11 will have link feature as Martin mentioned.
I think I will scan the items together as they are in the paper file currently. For example, in the document notes field I will have something like, "Donation 2011 - Membership Renewal"....and the scanned document attachment will be the copy of the check, the returned renewal form and the gift acknowledgment. I would create a standard way of entering the title into the notes with the first word being the category followed by the year, so we can easily sort by category.
We'll see how it goes!! I better get started....I only have till November to get this done! :)
Thank you again for your responses!!!