Director of Finance position leads to MIS enhancement
In my position as the Director of Finance for HootaThon 2017, I have been given financial tasks like creating a budget, counting all cash donations, and collaborating with my fundraising team. I was not aware just how much my position dealt with MIS-related tasks involving databases and spreadsheets to track registration, teams, events, etc.
HootaThon uses a database called DonorDrive mainly to register participants in our Dance Marathon and to track their fundraising efforts. More than that, it contains addresses, emails, teams, events, dates, and goals and allows administrators to organize multiple combinations of this data. My position frequently requires me to organize this data, which has lead to the exponential increase in my knowledge of MIS-related skills.
Querying
The database has the ability to pull reports with organized data from the events stored in the system. This function has allowed me to enhance a SQL query-like MIS-related skill. The first portion of pulling a report is to chose the order of the columns I wish to be displayed in a spreadsheet such as Participant First Name, Participant Email, Event Name, Registration Date, etc. This is essentially equivalent to the SELECT function in SQL. The next portion of pulling a report gives me the option to filter the results by fields such as Event Fiscal Year, Participant Total Raised, Participant Type, etc. with a variety of combinations such as Filter 1 and Filter 2 but not Filter 3. This is essentially equivalent to the WHERE function in SQL. In addition to that, I can even order the results of a column as ascending or descending like the ORDER BY function in SQL.
Excel
My admin account on DonorDrive has access to data from HootaThon 2015 and 2014; so, I am able to pull reports from those years in addition to our upcoming HootaThon 2017 event. Because of this, I am often asked to pull reports from those previous years to compare where we were then to where we are now, mainly in reference to registration and fundraising. I pull reports in the form of Excel spreadsheets and frequently utilize tools in the program to organize the data. One of the most common actions I take is cross-referencing one year’s data to another’s with the VLOOKUP function to gauge what past teams or participants we still have to encourage to register. In 2015 alone, there can be as many as 1271 rows of data to sort through; so I often utilize Pivot Tables to count, sum, or categorize the data.