I think it’s worth talking about this on an educational blog, because aside from using a progress tracker as a fundraising tracker it has plenty of uses within education for tracking progress in projects, and other goal tracking for staff or students.
A colleague asked if I would be able to assist in getting a progress tracker for showing progress towards a fundraising target. However, it’s not a simple fundraising target – we’re attempting to collect fruit pastilles tubes full of coins to reach a certain height. Most ‘Fundraising Thermometers’ and the like tend to be very restrictive in what you can label the axes with and how they are presented. Another issue was that they usually required some manual changing of the graphic to some degree in order to show any changes.
I decided I ought to figure out a way of designing my own and trying to produce a progress tracker that was both customisable and able to update interactively.
I found a helpful link, explaining how to create a tracker in Excel. This was great as it meant we could have any labels on the axes and we could have it updating in whatever way we wanted. In order to allow automatic updating and linking to the website, I thought to use Google Docs. I uploaded the file to Google Docs and had a play around with the formatting to adapt it to a more attractive format. The joy of Google Docs is that with the chart options you can ‘Publish Chart’, and it’ll give you some code that allows you to embed an interactive version of the chart in your website.
I can now give my colleague access to the spreadsheet to update as she wishes, and the chart will automatically update wherever it gets embedded. An example of what it could look like is at the bottom of our VLE (I was just playing around with it until I’m told what needs to be put onto it) – check it out.