For a fundraising event where doctors compete as guest bartenders, guests buy poker chips and drop them into buckets to vote for their favorite cocktail. Volunteers used to visit each table, count the chips by hand, and maintain a handwritten running tally. We built a reusable event app pairing a live leaderboard with a secure mobile portal for volunteers, so votes total automatically, guests can follow the competition in real time, and the foundation owns a system it can run again every year.
- Guests could follow the competition in real time instead of waiting for the final announcement
- Votes totaled automatically rather than through a handwritten master tally
- Fewer volunteers were required to run the voting portion of the event
- The foundation owns a system it can reuse for future events
The Business
Sky Foundation is a pancreatic cancer nonprofit whose signature fundraising event features local doctors competing as guest bartenders.
The Growth Constraint
Guests support their favorite cocktail by purchasing poker chips and placing them into that bartender's bucket. It is a genuinely fun format — and every part of counting it was manual. Volunteers walked the room, visited each table, counted chips by hand, and kept a handwritten running tally. The scoreboard existed only on paper, which created several limits:
- Guests could not see standings, so there was no visible race to react to.
- Volunteers spent the event counting instead of engaging with attendees.
- Totals were only as current as the last hand count.
- Results took time to calculate and verify before they could be announced.
The Solution
We built a reusable event app with two connected functions. A public live leaderboard updates dynamically as votes are counted, so the competition is visible on guests' phones and on venue screens throughout the night. A secure mobile portal lets volunteers submit chip totals directly from their phones, and the system combines those submissions into the standings automatically. The counting still happens in the room, but the tallying, math, and scoreboard no longer depend on one person and one sheet of paper.
What We Built
Business Value Created
The app changed the voting from an administrative task into part of the entertainment. Guests can watch the standings move and respond by buying more chips for their favorite bartender, which makes the competition itself a fundraising mechanism. At the same time, the foundation needs fewer volunteers on counting duty, results are ready when the event needs them, and the platform carries forward — next year's event starts from a proven system rather than a blank page.