Storing Attachments on Contact Reports in BBCRM

Jennifer Morell

Hi everyone. We have been asked by some fundraisers if they can add attachments to their contact reports. Of course, the answer is, they can. However, the more important question is should they.

We are trying to find out if anyone else is allowing their fundraisers to add attachments to contact reports. We are reticent to allow this because we don't want to affect the performance of our database. We were considering allowing a small group of people to add specific attachment types, but we are afraid that could lead to more requests.

I'm sure there are others in the community who have already gone down this road. We would love to hear from you.

Thank you.

Jennifer Morell

Corina Cervantes

@Jennifer Morell We have an imaging system that we use for attachments that has security and a file structure attached to it (we use Perceptive Experience), so we encourage any documentation beyond notes to be stored there. We have a small customization that shows as a link to the Perceptive content on the documentation tab, so authorized users can view any attachments for a constituent or donor. About the only time we would allow/encourage attachments directly into the CRM database is for Event management documents, since there is really not a “folder” for that in Perceptive Content.

ETA: We also have folders for Designations, so any documentation that is tied specifically to a designation (endowment agreements, endowment reports, etc.) can be loaded to the designation at that level as well.

Jennifer Morell

@Corina Cervantes Thank you for your response. It is very helpful.

@Dwight Dozier

Chris Whisenhunt

@Jennifer Morell, a lot of orgs are allowing the addition of documents to their database, which your right can be troublesome. We've worked with other orgs to upload to AWS or Azure and then save the link back to CRM so that the process is seamless to the user and makes the tech folks happy.

Happy to discuss.

Jennifer Morell

@Chris Whisenhunt thank you. I will bring this back to our team.