Campaign board for a learning drive
A fundraising campaign
that never asks for money.
Every campaign board you have ever seen works the same way. A goal, a thermometer, a leaderboard, a sponsor wall, a moment where somebody crosses the line. We built one of those and pointed the whole machine at something else: three hundred boys, twenty-one bunks, and a season of learning going up on a screen in the room.
The campaign runs itself. Counsellors enter what their bunk learned, and the board on the wall catches up within a minute — a gauge for the whole camp, the full roster scrolling past, standings by bunk, and a hall of fame for anyone who reached their own goal.
We are not collecting money. We are not collecting things. We are collecting Torah — and helping these kids become better people.
- Participants
- 300+the whole camp, individually
- Groups ranked
- 21bunks, by mean progress
- Board refresh
- 60swithout losing your place
- Clicks to run it
- 0it comes up with the screen
How it reads
Three bays, one glance
A board on a wall is read from across a room, usually by someone walking past it. So it is built to be understood in about two seconds and rewarding to stare at for two minutes.
The campaign
One number for the whole camp — the mean of every boy’s own percentage, so a camp of three hundred can be read off a single gauge. Underneath it, the top three overall and whoever sponsored the season.
The campers
Everybody, by name, all season. The roster rolls continuously so that any boy who walks past will see himself within a few minutes — which turns out to be the entire point of the thing.
Honours
A hall of fame that you only enter by reaching your own goal, and bunk standings underneath it. Goals are set per boy, so the hall is open to everyone rather than to the fastest few.
What was actually difficult
A screen nobody touches
for eight weeks
Nothing here is hard once. All of it is hard for fifty-six days straight, on a screen with no keyboard, in a room with no technical staff.
Refreshing without losing the reader
New data lands every minute, and the roster is mid-scroll when it does. Rows are updated in place and the list is only rebuilt when the set of campers actually changes — so the scroll never jumps back to the top under someone who is reading it.
Percentages that are allowed to run over
A boy who set a goal and then quadrupled it shows 439%, not a capped 100%. The bar fills to full and the number keeps going, which is the honest way to display it and the reason the hall of fame is worth reading.
More rows than the database will hand over
Every request is capped at a thousand rows, and the board needs the roster, the running totals and the last seven days for all of them. Each set is paged through until it is complete before a single number is drawn.
Whatever screen it ends up on
The layout is designed once at 1920×1080 and then scaled by whichever dimension is tighter, so an odd television, a projector or a portrait-ish panel stretches the furniture instead of cropping the content.
Why it looks like this
It is a bookcase,
not a dashboard
The obvious build is a dashboard: flat cards, a sans-serif, a progress bar, done by lunch. We made a piece of furniture instead — arched bays, shelves, brass plaques, dark walnut — because the room it hangs in is full of boys learning, and a bookcase is what that deserves to look like.
Every shelf earns its space. The gauge is one number. The plaque is one line. There are no celebration animations, no confetti, no sound. The board is calm on purpose, because it is on the wall all day and nobody should have to look away from it.
Where it runs
Three pieces of hardware,
none of them a computer
The screen
A television with a streaming stick behind it, running the board full-screen through a purpose-built app so there is no browser, no address bar and nothing to close by accident.
The tablet
A signed-in admin panel staff use to enter what was learned, adjust goals and manage the roster. It is the only way into the data, and it lives in the office.
Everything else
A hosted database and a static front end, so the whole thing costs almost nothing to keep running and survives a stick being unplugged for the winter.