Whoopie! We made a song! Well actually, thousands of donors around the world made a song. Every note in “Sound of Giving” represents donations that occurred during a specific window of time on #GivingTuesday 2017.

As you probably know, #GivingTuesday is a donation bonanza. This year was the largest yet and our team had a great time watching the impact happen live! Seeing all the activity, a few Funraise developers wondered what all those donations sounded like. Was there an audio pattern we could learn something from—or at least make something cool with?

So here's how we did it!

First, we made each donation a note. Each note represents a single donation occurring during a specific time period on #GivingTuesday 2017. The pitch of each note is determined by the amount of the donation. For the music nerds, we also quantized notes, just a slight time adjustment to nudge everyone in place.

Next, we separated donations by tracks and created the band! Here's what that looks like.

Mallet 1

MasterCard donation

Mallet 2

Amex donation

Harp

Visa donation

Organ

Non USD donation

Strings

Over $500 donation

Bass

Recurring donation

Lead Guitar

One-time donation on Campaign Site

Rhythm Guitar

One-time donation off Campaign Site

We also added a drummer. The drum beat is not directly affected by donation activity, although we did cue some beats we felt told the story!

And finally, we mixed it all together. For mixing, we zoomed in to interesting and compelling activity points by moving forward and backward specific instruments. For example, you’ll notice a tasty dueling guitar solo at about 1:30, which is the activity between donations occuring on Campaign Sites and donations occurring on Giving Forms on organization's sites.

The coolest part about this is that thousands of people around the world took action on #GivingTuesday and many of them contributed to this song. We just love that and we hope you do too!