How to Build Fundraising Screens

Fundraising is a way of collecting voluntary contributions or donations for a purpose. From door to door, on a shopping street, on television, on the internet, Facebook collections etc. Fundraising is on the rise, especially due to social media. Think about fundraising for a new church, fundraising to help victims of disasters, fundraising to treat a child with a severe disease etc. We all know examples of recent fundraising.

With the help of a computer or television screen, you can use PowerPoint to visualize your fundraising action. Show a clear description of your goal, show how much you need (if there is any maximum), and more important: show the current sum of all donations to motivate others to donate too because you haven’t reached the target amount.

In this article, I will show you how you can use PowerPoint and DataPoint to do better fundraising by visualizing the fundraising action.

To start, we need to use a file where we store the information about our fundraising. We can store the different donations in an Excel file and then finally we can create a sum of all donations. That is what we need to store. So we are going to use a simple Excel file for this purpose with 2 sheets. One sheet to store the individual donations (who, when, amount) and then a second datasheet to calculate the sum. Of course you can calculate the sum too at the end of all donations on the first tab, but this separate tab has the advantage for presentating that we always can look at the exact same cell position, no matter how many donations we will have in the future.

To start using DataPoint, we open the list of data providers, select the Microsoft Excel data provider, and we add a connection to the Excel file like so.

After that, we create a new query where we select the datasheet that we want to use, we make sure that the Excel range includes our data, and we set the refresh rate to e.g. 1 second.

Here you can see a data preview of what we have linked to, and what the current values are. Now we can start using this on our slides and shapes.

Use or insert a new text box on your slide and click DataPoint, Text box button. On here, we dynamically link the content of this text box to our Excel cell.

At the Format tab, we choose to format this number as a currency with a currency symbol and thousand-separator.

Now, this text box is dynamically linked to the sum of all donations. Whenever there is new information, the number will update accordingly.

Then, we need to add some more visuals to the slide. This will better to illustrate the progress and target of our action. We use a thermometer and first we set the position of the mercury (the fluid in our thermometer) to the maximum position. Then we click DataPoint, Meter button.

Set the data connection and column to bind this meter to our sum of donations. Set the meter property to Height because we are going to change the height of this mercury-shape dynamically, based on the value that we have in the Excel file.

Adjust the value range: here we set it from 0 to 100,000 because 100,000 is the amount that we want to collect.

And finally click the button Use current height of shape as maximum height.

And now, our fundraising thermometer is ready. The mercury shape is correct positioned on value 64K on our meter, as well as displayed as a normal number at our text box.

We can now run this presentation as a kiosk presentation on our computer or television. The kiosk setting will make sure that the slideshow runs forever. DataPoint will take care that the number is refreshed in real-time.

You can now add more donation to the donation sheet of your Excel file. The sum will be automatically updated on the second tab by Microsoft Excel. PowerPoint will run the slideshow and DataPoint as PowerPoint plugin will update the sum of donations every second on your slide.

Can’t be easier than this! Good luck with your fundraising project!

Do you want to use this sample fundraising PowerPoint presentation and Excel spreadsheet? Sure! We would love to contribute this to your project.