A data-driven transparency project analyzing costs, donations, and impact for a community fundraiser supporting the Capital Area Food Bank.
Project Links
This project is part thank-you to old friends, part nuts-and-bolts tool for the planning committee. I put together this dashboard to help us see where the money went, set real donation goals, and show everyone—donors and volunteers alike—how their help made a difference. Full of personal touches like photo reels, vintage logos, and COVID gags, it's one of the most heartfelt community projects I’ve been part of.
Project Overview
The Harvest Party is an annual community fundraiser supporting the Capital Area Food Bank. I turned the event's historical financial records into an interactive data story for the planning committee, donors, and volunteers—making the numbers easier to explore while preserving the personality of an event built around friends, food, and live music.
Using Python and pandas, I cleaned and explored the data before building interactive visualizations with Plotly.js and Tableau. The analysis revealed that bar and music were among the largest expense categories, while annual expenses generally rose over time. Year-by-year comparisons also showed how the event's financial outcomes changed, including early losses and a later return to positive net results.
The project combines exploratory analysis, interactive dashboards, and a mobile-responsive website to make the event's finances more transparent. It also surfaced an important limitation: as Facebook became a less reliable way to measure attendance, RSVP-based cost-per-attendee figures became increasingly misleading. The result is both a practical planning resource and a record of a community event, with a few festive visualizations and pandemic-era Easter eggs along the way.
Alternate, exhaustively comprehensive desktop version here
Gallery
Web pie chart: Categorized expenses overlaid on a pumpkin
pie—festive and thematic, serving up a visual slice of party
spending.
Web bar chart: Cumulative expenses by category, showing that Bar
and Music account for the largest shares.
Web bar chart: Itemized expenses for 2019, a typical year,
providing a detailed breakdown of spending.
Web Sunburst Plot: Colorful. Visually striking. Possibly a wee
bit unwieldy, but undeniably eye-catching. Made mostly for the fun
of it; opportunities for sunburst charts don’t come around
often.
Tableau dashboard: Visualizing expenses, donations, and net
annual gain or loss. Early years show net losses—especially in
2021, post-COVID—followed by a return to positive net
donations.
Tableau dashboard: Facebook RSVPs and cost per person. Facebook’s
declining relevance contributes to the apparent drop in attendance
post-COVID. This metric is failing, yet it still doesn’t explain
the tripling of expenses per attendee.
Tableau dashboard: Annual expenses by year, with bar charts
highlighting steadily rising costs.
Google Colab EDA: Box and whisker plot showing the distribution
of expenses by category, with Bar and Music consistently the
highest.
Images courtesy of the Harvest Party Planning Committee
References
Dataset provided by the Harvest Party Planning Committee.
Heartfelt gratitude to all Harvest Party attendees and the dedicated volunteers who brought this event to life and made it so special year after year.