Build a Living Impact Tracker (Spreadsheet Mini-Project)

The number-one reason teams panic in January is that their impact lives in a hundred Instagram posts and zero spreadsheets. Fix that now by building a Living Impact Tracker that you update all year, so writing the submission becomes a query, not an archaeology dig.

Step 1 — Create the columns. Open Google Sheets and create a tab named Activities with headers that mirror the official FIRST Impact Award Documentation Form chart:

Doc ID | Date | Activity Name | Definition Term | Audience Type | # People Reached | Hours | Location | Partner Org | Evidence Link | Notes

Step 2 — Standardize the Definition Term column with a dropdown (Data > Data validation) limited to the official terms FIRST defines in the FIRST Impact Award Definitions (Rev. Jan 2026): Started, Mentored, Published Resources, Host, Supported, Reached, Advocated. These seven are the only formally defined terms — note that 'assist' and 'run' are common words but are NOT defined headline terms (in fact the Definitions say lighter, less-consistent help than mentoring 'would simply be considered assisting a team'). Using the exact defined terms trains your team to think in the judges' language and makes filtering trivial.

Step 3 — Auto-number Doc IDs. In the Doc ID cell use:

="ID-"&TEXT(ROW()-1,"000")

This yields ID-001, ID-002, etc. — the exact format the documentation form requests (use numerical numbers i.e. ID-001).

Step 4 — Build a summary dashboard. On a new Dashboard tab, compute the headline numbers judges and you will both want:

Total people reached:   =SUM(Activities!F2:F)
Total volunteer hours:  =SUM(Activities!G2:G)
Teams started:          =COUNTIFS(Activities!D2:D,"Started")
Teams mentored:         =COUNTIFS(Activities!D2:D,"Mentored")
Unique partner orgs:    =COUNTA(UNIQUE(FILTER(Activities!I2:I,Activities!I2:I<>"")))

Step 5 — Filter for the 3-year window. The documentation form is explicit: 'only turn in documentation for activities within the past 3 years.' Add a helper cell with the cutoff date and a recency flag:

C1 (cutoff): =DATE(YEAR(TODAY())-3,1,1)
In-window?:  =IF(B2>=$C$1,"YES","old")

Worked example. Team 5985's winning essay is essentially this tracker rendered as prose: 'EVERY WEEK: 760+km of travel, 220+ students, 12 locations and 36 hours in 15 classes!'; 'Since 2015, PB has mentored 212 FLLC teams (starting 108) globally'; 'A system raising $675k+ in grants and material for 39 schools and FIRST teams.' Those are not poetic flourishes — they are cells in a spreadsheet someone maintained for years. When you can write =COUNTIFS(D2:D,"Started") and get a real number, your essay writes itself.

Pro move: add a Quote column where, right after each event, a student pastes one sentence from a participant. A real quote captured in March is worth ten reconstructed in January. By season's end you will have a tracker that doubles as your documentation-form backbone and your essay's evidence locker.