The Hidden Problem with Grassroots Fundraising (And Why Spreadsheets Don’t Scale)

Spreadsheets don’t fail immediately.

They fail gradually.

At first, everything works fine. A small group. A simple competition. A few updates each week.

But then things grow.

When “Good Enough” Stops Being Good Enough

Grassroots football clubs are brilliant at finding ways to raise money.

From raffles to events to competitions, people get involved, support the club, and create a sense of community.

One of the most popular formats is “Last Person Standing” game. Players pay to enter and the money is split between the winner and fundraising team

But behind the scenes, it’s usually run like this:

A spreadsheet tracks all players
Picks are submitted via WhatsApp or text
One person manually checks results
Updates are posted manually each week

It works… until it doesn’t.

The Scaling Problem

The bigger the competition gets, the harder it becomes to manage:

More players = more admin
More picks = more room for error
More messages = more confusion

At some point, the organiser becomes the bottleneck.

And when that happens:

Updates slow down
Mistakes creep in
Engagement drops

The Hidden Cost

This is the part most people don’t talk about. It’s not just about time, it’s about sustainability.

If running the competition becomes a chore, one of two things happens:

The organiser stops running it
Or they scale it back

Either way, the club loses out.

There Has to Be a Better Way

This is exactly the problem I explored in my previous post:

👉 Why I Built LastPersonStanding.net

The issue isn’t the idea.

The issue is how it’s being executed.

Manual processes don’t scale.

And in 2026 – they don’t need to.

The Shift: From Manual to Automated

What if:

Picks were tracked automatically?
Results were processed instantly?
Eliminations were handled without admin?

That’s the shift.

From:

Manual tracking
Human bottlenecks
Spreadsheet dependency

To:

Automation
Scalability
Better engagement

What This Enables

Once you remove the admin, everything changes:

Competitions can scale
Organisers don’t burn out
Players stay engaged longer

And most importantly:

It becomes a reliable way to raise money.

Where This Leads

This is exactly why I built:

👉 LastPersonStanding.net

Not to change the game, but to remove the friction around it.

What’s Next

In the next post, I’ll talk about something slightly different:

Why I decided to build this in public, and what that actually means.

PakarPBN

A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.

In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.

The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.

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