About this fundraiser
How this was built.
The SMES Grade 6 Class of 2027 fundraising committee spent nine months building the parent-claim page, dashboards, email templates, and post-event reports you see across this site. Here is what's there, who built it, and how to fork it for another committee.
Who built it
A six-person volunteer committee
The Class of 2027 Grade 6 events committee at St. Matthew's Elementary in Surrey, BC — a 130-family Catholic elementary school — held the questions, ran the meetings, made the spreadsheets, and pulled off three concession events plus year-round pizza lunches in the 2025–2026 school year.
Building the infrastructure on this site was an attempt to honour that work: so the templates, workflows, and lessons could be made again by the next committee, at this school or another.
What was built
The pieces
Every piece is small, opinionated, and made to be reused — by next year's committee, by another school, by anyone who wants the same shape with their own details.
A claim & pledge page parents actually use
+/− cards for every concession item. Cart that adds up live. Three pledge methods (e-transfer, gift card, pickup) that match how families actually contribute. A live thermometer showing the community's collective progress.
Confirmations that respect parents' time
Email and SMS, opt-in by which contact you provided. The email includes a shopping guide for pickup parents, a digital gift-card option, and a private link to come back to anytime to view, edit, or cancel a pledge. No login. No app.
A live committee dashboard
Real-time pledge progress, item coverage, and a thermometer toward the goal. Committee members see at a glance which items still need families and which are covered — without spreadsheet refreshes or manual counting.
Schema as data, code as glue
The shopping list lives in a Google Sheet. Add a row, the parent page picks it up. Uncheck a box, the item disappears. Edit the event date in a Constants tab, the email subject lines update. The committee owns the data; the code just renders it.
Honest accounting, every time
Past-event reports show revenue, expenses, and what was learned. Net to team is a derived number, not a marketing claim. Parents see exactly where every dollar went.
Designed to be reused
Next year's committee — or a sister school's committee — can fork this entire setup. Change the event name, the goal, the menu items. The structure stays; the content changes.
The platform
Built on InfiniTEA
The infrastructure beneath this site runs on InfiniTEA, a small platform used across several committee and community projects. Sheets API, Apps Script, Twilio for SMS, Vercel for the public site — standard pieces, glued thoughtfully.
Pieces that already existed for earlier committees were borrowed. New pieces authored for this committee were written once, then made available to be borrowed back. That's the whole loop.
For another committee
Pour it forward
If your child's class needs a fundraiser, your parent group is running a concession, or you're starting a committee from scratch and the spreadsheets feel overwhelming — take this. Use it. Change what doesn't fit.
The Class of 2027 committee inherited a starting point from the committees that came before. Building this was our turn to leave it warmer for whoever pours next.