Adding Media

I have a dummy Constituent Record for stuff like this.  If you truly want it on every record, you'll have to embed it on the Media Tab of each one manually and individually.  If you can Globally Change your Action to reference a dummy record (mine has a Constituent ID of 456123, which I would include in the reference note), then someone down the road looking for the actual invitation sent can follow the note on the Action to the dummy record, and there find the invitation.


I do this for Appeals that don't get custom handwritten notes from our CEO, our newsletters, just about anything we send out.  And for the Appeals that do get completely customized with handwritten notes, I usually scan those into one big file and attach that to my dummy record...rather than spend the time setting up each one as a separate file and attaching.


If you are considering moving to NXT in the future, you will want to embed and not link your Media.  NXT Attachments work differently (drag-and-drop easy, but not "backwards compatible") but I still use a dummy record for situations like this...until the developers provide a place to put Attachments that can be (easily, via Global Add or Global Change) linked to multiple records.

I am in complete agreement with the dummy record idea!  Since you don't have the event module, so you can't add it to the event, which was also a good idea, this will allow you to upload/embed it once instead of however many hundreds of records you may have sent out the invites to.  Then, put an action onto the records you sent it to, which is possible to do globally if you can query this group of people you want to have it on.  Put into your notes on the action, or the comments of the attribute if you go that route instead, that the invitation is viewable on the dummy record.

Kristy Tabor:

We are hosting a reception for past board members of our organization.  We have sent over 100 invitations.  I'd like to add the invitation, as Media, to each constituents record.  I haven't found a way to add the media to the entire group.  Does anyone know the best way to do this, or do I have to add the Media to each constituent, one at a time?

Thanks for any suggestions.

Kristy Tabor

Easterseals Arkansas

I do not recommend adding these as media objects to everyone's record. Will you do this for all mailings? What is the purpose? Your database will grow exponentially if you do this a lot. I assume this is the intention for why you can't globally add these to multiple records.


Someday if my dream were to come true there would be a media tab on appeal records. So you could record these kinds of things as appeals and then add ONE media object to the appeal and you can see what was sent.

I agree with John...unless you are Hosted by Blackbaud, in which case you do not have the Link option for Media.  (And if you are on NXT, you must be Hosted.)