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 out 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), Alt+A, right click rename and rename the first document to what you would like. Windows Explorer will then rename the documents the same but with (1), (2), (3) etc. at the end. You can then use those names for your spreadsheet.
- 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
- 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. mydocument.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 with a closed bracket and number 1 at the end - e.g:
mydocument (1
In cell A2 add your document name with a closed bracket and number 2 at the end - e.g:
mydocument (2
Then highlight cells A1+A2, then fill down as per this Microsoft's support article - how to fill down data
Then in B2 insert a closed bracket and 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
=CONCATONATE(A1,B1)
and then fill down - your document names in the column can then be copied and Pasted As Values into the AttachedDocument column in your main template.
- Save As and call your file a new name e.g. 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.
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