You can upload documents and link them to activities and Gift Aid Declarations on constituent timelines.

This article explains how to upload a document to a constituent record individually – It’s a great way of working if you have a small number of documents to upload.

However, if you have a lot of documents to upload and link, you may find it better to use the File Uploader within Donorfy to upload a batch of activities with linked documents, such as letters or Gift Aids. This article explains how that is done.

You would do this if you had downloaded a list of constituents to produce a mail merge and then wanted a copy of the letter produced visible within Donorfy. (Uploading letters).

Follow the steps below to bulk upload and link your documents:

Step 1.

Create new Activities or Gift Aid Declarations

From Data Management > File Upload click on Update Template and then download the Data Preparation Template.

Open the Data Preparation Template and delete the tabs which you will not be using, e.g. leaving just the Activities tab

Enter your data onto the spreadsheet, noting the following:

• In addition to the details of the constituent (this can be just the constituent number) and new activities or gift aid declarations, the spreadsheet must include the name of a document that should be linked to the activity or gift aid declaration
• The name of the document to be linked needs to be included in the spreadsheet in the column called 'AttachedDocument'. 
  
  Important the name of the document must be less than 50 characters long
  
  
• In order to link correctly to a constituent record, the documents need to have a unique name - this could be based on the type of document, constituent number and date, e.g.
  
  
  • if you were uploading pdfs for Gift Aid Declarations your file name might be in the format: GAD<Constituent Number>.<Year>
    e.g. GAD1234.2017.pdf
    
    
  • If you have a single document that you would like to be added to multiple constituents then you will need to duplicate the document the required number of times (i.e using copy and paste function).
    Once you have the number of documents you require, select:
    Alt+A and then right-click rename
    Rename the first document to what you would like it to be called and press enter.
    Windows Explorer will then rename the documents the same but with (1), (2), (3) etc. at the end.
    
    
  • Next, the special characters, such as the brackets and underscores will need to be removed as these are not accepted by the document uploader. If there are only a small handful of files to do this to then it can be done manually. However, if there are a lot of files to remove brackets and underscores from then you can follow the below process:
    
    • Move the Files to their own Folder (this is important)
      • Then 
        • Hold SHIFT + Right Click on mouse
        • Select "Open PowerShell here" - This will open a terminal screen
        • Enter the following code after the directory name and replace MYFILENAME with the name of your file : 
          $nr=1; Dir | %{Rename-Item $_ -NewName ("MYFILENAME{0:000}$($_.Extension)" -f $nr++)}
          
          For example, if my files are named: This is a test (1), This is a test (2), etc
          then the code would be:
          $nr=1; Dir | %{Rename-Item $_ -NewName ("This is a test{0:000}$($_.Extension)" -f $nr++)}
      • Press Enter
    • This will rename all the files in that folder so that they appear as follows
      
      This is a test001
      This is a test002
      This is a test003
      etc
      
      
  • You can then use those names for your spreadsheet.
    
    
• The document name must include the file extension
  i.e. if it is a Word document, it must include the docx or doc extension, e.g. test001.docx

If you are uploading a single document to multiple contacts in Donorfy and have used the Windows Explorer copy function, then this can be replicated in Excel as follows:

Open a new Excel sheet

 
In cell A1 add your document name for example: This is a test001

In cell A2 add your document name for example: This is a test002

In cell A3 add your document name for example: This is a test003
 
Then highlight cells A1+A3, then fill down as many cells as you require file names for as per this Microsoft's support article - how to fill down data
 
In B2 insert your file extension, e.g .docx 
And then fill down. 
 
Then in cell C3 insert a concatenate formula to join it all together... for example

=CONCATENATE(A1,B1)

And then fill down. 

This will bring the file name in column A and the file extension together in Column C, for example:

This is a test001.docx

Copy the document names in column C and Paste As Values into the AttachedDocument column in your main template.

• Save As and call your file a new name e.g. Document_Uplaods_Activity_01122018.xlsx
  
  

Step 2.

Upload your file to File Upload in Donorfy

Before you start, you may find this article has some useful information relating to Performing the Import. 

You will now need to upload your file to Donorfy through the File Uploader. Go to Data Management > File Upload

To upload your documents to Donorfy, drag and drop them into the File Upload area (shaded upload area)

The status of the upload will be shown in the Files uploaded in the last 30 days area

Once the file has completed the uploading and matching, assuming all went well, you can click on the Apply Changes button.

The status will show as This file has been applied.

For file exceptions please refer to this article. 

Step 3.

Upload the documents that you would like to link

In Donorfy go to Data Management > File Upload and click on the Linked Documents tab

To upload your documents to Donorfy, drag and drop them into the Upload Linked Documents area (shaded upload area)

Once the documents upload to Donorfy they will be shown in the To be Resolved list - this means they are waiting to be linked to an Activity or Gift Aid Declaration.

Once all the documents have uploaded click the refresh button in the To be Resolved section. The documents will then link themselves to the Activities that you created in the previous step.

Step 4.

Fixing errors or non-matches

Occasionally a document may fail to link to a constituent record – this may be because of a number of reasons, for example:

• Incorrect data within the file that was uploaded with the document links on, e.g. constituent number incorrect, document file extension missing or incorrect
• The file had not finished uploading before the To be Resolved section was refreshed
• The file document name isn’t unique

These can be fixed manually from the 'To be Resolved' list as follows, click on the 'Find constituent for this document' button and find the correct constituent.

Once you have found the constituent you can choose either the activity or gift aid declaration that the document should be linked to from the activities and gift aid declarations listed on a constituent timeline during the last 3 years.

Once you have selected the correct item from the list click on the Link Document to Selected Item button - the document will then be linked to the activity and will be removed from the To be resolved list.

For documents that you are unable to locate from the list, you can delete them from the To be Resolved list and then locate the activity on the constituent record and manually upload it to the activity.