Excel for Nonprofits: Skills for Donor and Grant Work

Excel for nonprofits comes down to a small set of skills: totalling gifts by fund or campaign, counting donors, summarising a long gift list, and showing a funder how a grant was spent. You don't need macros or advanced modelling. You need SUMIF, SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, a PivotTable and a tidy budget sheet. This guide is for anyone applying to a development, fundraising, programme or finance role at a charity or nonprofit.

Which Excel skills do nonprofits use most?#

Nonprofit spreadsheet work is mostly about answering "how much?" and "how many?" for different groups of gifts. These five skills cover most of it:

Most donor databases can export a gift list to Excel, so these skills apply wherever your data starts. If you are coming from a finance background, the Excel skills for finance jobs overlap a lot with this list.

All the examples below use this gift list in A1:D8:

The total of all seven gifts is 2,135.

How to total donations by fund or campaign with SUMIF#

SUMIF adds up the amounts in rows that match one condition. The syntax is =SUMIF(range, criteria, sum_range): the column to check, what to match, and the column to add.

=SUMIF(C2:C8,"Education",D2:D8)

This returns 870 (250 + 500 + 120). Change the criteria to total any fund or campaign:

For a summary table, type the campaign names in a column and point the criteria at those cells instead of typing the text. The guide to summing by category shows that layout step by step, and the SUMIF function guide is a quick syntax reference.

How to split restricted and unrestricted funds#

Restricted gifts are money a donor gave for a specific purpose, such as a school programme. Unrestricted gifts can pay for anything, including running costs. Funders and boards often ask for the two totals separately, so keep a Fund column and total each group.

In our list, "General" is unrestricted money and every other fund is restricted:

=SUMIF(C2:C8,"General",D2:D8)
=SUMIF(C2:C8,"<>General",D2:D8)

The first returns 1,075 (unrestricted). The second returns 1,060 (restricted). The <> means "not equal to". Together they add up to the 2,135 total, which is a quick way to check nothing was missed.

How to total and count with two conditions#

SUMIFS and COUNTIFS check two or more conditions at once, and a row counts only when it meets all of them. Note that SUMIFS puts the range to add first:

=SUMIFS(D2:D8,B2:B8,"Gala",C2:C8,"Education")

This returns 500: Gala gifts that went to the Education fund. COUNTIFS works the same way but counts rows instead of adding them:

The SUMIFS function guide and the COUNTIFS function guide list every argument. For more worked examples, read COUNTIFS and SUMIFS with multiple conditions.

How to summarise a donor list with a PivotTable#

A PivotTable builds a whole summary table at once, without writing a formula for each row. It is the fastest way to answer "total by donor" or "total by campaign" on hundreds of gifts.

1. Click any cell in the gift list.
2. On the Insert tab, click PivotTable, then OK to place it on a new sheet.
3. Drag Campaign to Rows and Amount to Values.

You get one row per campaign: Gala 1,500, Online 160, Spring Appeal 475, and a grand total of 2,135. Drag Donor into Rows instead to see each donor once with their total, which also tells you how many different donors gave (5 here). Switch the value from Sum to Count to see how many gifts each campaign brought in. The beginner's guide to PivotTables covers filters and grouping by month.

How to track a grant budget against actual spending#

A grant report usually compares what you planned to spend on each line with what you actually spent. Four columns are enough:

• Remaining in D2: =B2-C2. A negative number means the line is overspent.
• % spent in E2: =C2/B2, formatted as a percentage.
• A flag in F2: =IF(C2>B2,"Over budget","OK"). Travel shows Over budget.

Fill the formulas down, then total Budget and Actual with SUM: 40,000 budgeted, 30,450 spent, so about 76% of the grant is used. The article on budget vs actual in Excel adds variance percentages and conditional formatting.

Keep donor data clean before you calculate#

Every formula above depends on consistent labels. SUMIF ignores capital letters, but not spaces or spelling. If one row says "Spring Appeal " with a trailing space, or "Spring Apeal", that gift drops out of the Spring Appeal total without any error.

A few habits prevent most problems:

• Use a drop-down list (Data > Data Validation) for Campaign and Fund so people pick from fixed options.
• Store amounts as numbers, not text. Numbers stored as text are ignored by SUM and SUMIF.
• Keep one gift per row, with the date, donor, campaign, fund and amount in their own columns.
• Check that your SUMIF totals add back up to the overall total, as in the restricted example.

How to show these skills in a nonprofit interview#

Interviewers want to see that you can turn a gift list into a clear answer. Be ready to total gifts for one campaign, split restricted from unrestricted money, and explain a budget line that is over. If you are not sure where your skills stand, take the Excel level test to find your gaps, then try the timed basic Excel test to practise under time pressure.

Practise it#

Formulas stick when you type them yourself. Practise SUMIF in a live spreadsheet: you type the formula and it checks it instantly. Then move on to COUNTIFS and SUMIFS with several conditions and build your first PivotTable, or start with the exercise on this page.