donations during an event

Nissa Erickson

Hello! We're holding a large, in-person fundraising event. We'd like to collect credit card donations using our merchant services form during the event, but we're wondering about the capacity for real-time updates throughout the event, and if there is a way to display a thermometer of donations?

Beth Trainer

Hi Nissa!

If you are comfortable with creating a query of donations made during your specific time frame, you could try creating a pivot table odata connection. It's nice in excel that you can set the data to refresh every so often - for me as an example, we have a monitor set up in our guest services office that refreshes a ticket scan count every thirty minutes to give us a new total.

You could then use that real-time data to chart for a visualization. Here's an easy example of how to recreate a “thermometer-like” chart in excel:

Hope that idea helps give something to consider!

Beth

Sarah Osborne

Beth Trainer:

Hi Nissa!

If you are comfortable with creating a query of donations made during your specific time frame, you could try creating a pivot table odata connection. It's nice in excel that you can set the data to refresh every so often - for me as an example, we have a monitor set up in our guest services office that refreshes a ticket scan count every thirty minutes to give us a new total.

You could then use that real-time data to chart for a visualization. Here's an easy example of how to recreate a “thermometer-like” chart in excel:

Hope that idea helps give something to consider!

Beth

Hi Beth,

This is awesome! Do you have resources for how to set up a pivot table odata connection? I am so interested in this for both our staff and our fundraising events as well. I have yet to dive into either pivots or odata, but I'm eager to learn. Any advice on where to start would be wonderful!

Thanks so much,
Sarah Osborne