Deep Dive Chapter I: Donation
One of the characteristics that we hope sets Northwest Hospitality apart, is our transparency and the accessibility of information that might be useful to our donors. To this end we manage our entire operation using a platform called "Airtable" which combines many aspects of spreadsheets with useful database tools. Depending on what you find exciting, it's likely this post will be a bit dry. But if you have any questions or are interested at all about how we take care of our donors, this should be fun.
As of this writing, the donation table in our Airtable base shows 170 donations since our inception in 2016. Each of those donations has 61 fields that we keep track of and use to create useful reports for our donors.
You can personally interact with a pared-down view of this table on our operation details page. Using this view at your convenience, you can satisfy many questions.
The unfiltered table shows Northwest Hospitality's overall donation history. With field summaries in the very bottom row you can see how much our donors have contributed and what has been directed to PayPal as transaction fees.
While we prevent any personal information from being shared publicly, you have a personal donor ID number that can be used to filter the table so you can see just your donations. Add another filter and you can see your donations per calendar year. You will also see how much you've paid in PayPal fees if you donate through PayPal, which account your donations are applied to, and whether your donations are currently registered as recurring monthly.
Airtable has chart and graph features in the works so I'm looking forward to augmenting these detailed tables with some pretty visuals in the future.
If you ever have questions about what you see or struggle to find anything, we would truly be happy to work through it with you. Our donors are absolutely essential to our mission so it's an honor to make sure you are satisfied with everything going on behind the scenes.
If you found this particular post while looking for a way to donate, don't worry, we've got you covered too; thank you!
We are planning on doing deep dives into each of the operation detail tools available to you, so stay tuned if this is your kind of topic.