Excel Spreadsheet Features for Effective Grant-Giver Fundraising

Excel Spreadsheet Features for Effective Grant-Giver Fundraising

Grant-giver fundraising plays a vital role in supporting non-profits and organizations in their noble endeavours. To maximise success in securing grants, it is crucial to manage and organize fundraising efforts efficiently. Excel, the popular spreadsheet software, offers a range of powerful features that can streamline your grant-giver fundraising process. In this blog post, we will explore some of the useful Excel spreadsheet features that can help you effectively manage grants and elevate your fundraising efforts.

1. Data Validation:

Maintaining accurate and consistent data is crucial in grant-giver fundraising. Excel's data validation feature allows you to set specific criteria for data entry, reducing errors and ensuring data integrity. You can create drop-down lists for selecting grant types, funding amounts, or eligibility requirements, making it easier to input data consistently across different applications. This feature helps in generating clean and reliable reports, enhancing your credibility as a grant seeker.

2. Conditional Formatting:

Excel's conditional formatting feature enables you to highlight important information instantly based on specific conditions. You can use this feature to automatically format cells based on criteria such as funding deadlines, priority levels, or application statuses. By visually differentiating between pending, approved, or rejected grants, you can efficiently track and manage your fundraising progress. Conditional formatting helps you quickly identify critical actions required and make informed decisions regarding your grant applications.

3. PivotTables:

PivotTables are a powerful tool in Excel that allow you to summarize and analyse large sets of data. When dealing with multiple grant applications and funders, PivotTables enable you to quickly aggregate and organize data to gain valuable insights. You can analyse funding trends, identify top grant providers, compare success rates, and assess the impact of your fundraising efforts. With PivotTables, you can make data-driven decisions, refine your fundraising strategy, and improve your chances of securing grants.

4. Formulas and Functions:

Excel's extensive library of formulas and functions provides tremendous flexibility for performing complex calculations and automating repetitive tasks. You can utilize formulas to calculate total funding amounts, determine percentage distributions, track budget allocations, and forecast future funding needs. Functions such as SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, and AVERAGEIFS enable you to extract specific data based on multiple criteria, allowing for in-depth analysis and reporting. Mastering these formulas and functions empowers you to manage your grant-giver fundraising activities efficiently.

5. Collaboration and Sharing:

Grant-giver fundraising often involves collaboration among team members, partners, and stakeholders. Excel offers various collaboration and sharing features that allow real-time collaboration on spreadsheets. You can leverage Excel Online or cloud storage platforms like OneDrive or Google Drive to collaborate seamlessly, making it easier to track progress, share updates, and gather input from multiple contributors. Collaborative features ensure everyone stays on the same page, streamlining your grant-giver fundraising efforts.

6. Remove Duplicates:

When making lists, whether of grant-giver names or list of donors, you don’t want duplicates where you could end up applying and asking for money twice. This can cause extra work and/or embarrassment with the person you’ve contacted. At worst, it can damage your relationships and people not giving. In a basic use of Excel, you could sort the data by name and spot where you see names repeated more than once. Or you can use the Remove Duplicate feature in a certain column. You can ask it to highlight duplicates in red or even ask it to remove them automatically.

7. Filter Feature

If you’ve got a list of grant-givers and you want to find one that gives to buildings, you can spend your time reading all the criteria until you fund some. Or you can use the Find tool and go through each occurrence of the word one-by-one. Better yet, use the filter feature on a column to search for your key word and it will reduce your list to only the rows that contain that word. Simply copy your new list into a new sheet or file and then remove the filter to see your original data.

8. Update the Date Formula

This works well with a calendar you’re creating of tasks or social media posts. For example, you might write a list of social media posts for your upcoming Crowd Funding campaign. For each post, you write the date to be published. However, your launch changes and so all the dates need to change too. Nightmare. You could go through and update each date.

Or use a simple formula such as =SUM($H$2+A2)

The dollar symbols before the letter and number of the cell reference means it is a static reference that you don want to change. A2 is the number of days before or after the event. You use the static reference to out your launch date and then the changing reference can be the number of days after the launch. So if your first post is -2 days before the launch, it’s -2. If it’s 5 days after, it’s 5.

Excel's robust features make it an invaluable tool for managing and optimizing grant-giver fundraising efforts. By leveraging data validation, conditional formatting, PivotTables, formulas, and collaboration capabilities, you can streamline your workflow, enhance data accuracy, gain insights, and improve your chances of securing grants. Incorporating these Excel features into your fundraising strategy will empower your organisation to be more efficient, effective, and successful in its mission to make a positive impact on society.