We’re doing our annual Sharathon at WCSG this week. For those of you familiar with a Public Radio fundraiser, it’s the same thing. We’re raising money for the 2007 year, so this is Sharathon 2007.
Every year I think I’m going to blog about it at the beginning, and I never do. The last several years we haven’t met the goal we’d set, but it really looks like we’re going to make it this year. There are 3 hours left, and we only need $100,000 to to make our goal of $1.25M.
When I started here, Sharathon was calculated on an elaborate (and well made) Excel sheet. When we started doing web pledges, we simply printed them and threw them in the pot of phone pledges. Last year for the first time we went the other way, and made everything web based, so when people call in the phone volunteers are simply filling out the web form.
This made it so that the big “calculator” on the big screen TV in the front of the room is just an html table pulling data from MySQL, so no-one has to manually update it.
The guy that usually manages the numbers, and makes sure every tallys, and makes hard split decisions about what to do with questionable pledges is at a conference this year. Since I built the software we’re using, I got elected to take his position this year. It’s a very scary place to be, making sure everything jives, and not losing all our data.
On the other hand, it’s going well, and we’re almost done. 🙂
