A growing scholarship program for student athletes was running on email threads, copy-paste data entry, and manual eligibility checks. Here's how a Salesforce-native intake and screening system freed up staff time, gave applicants faster answers, and gave leadership a real-time view of how many scholarships they could actually afford to fund.
A nationally recognized nonprofit foundation runs a scholarship program for student athletes from underserved communities. When I came on board, the program was growing, but the infrastructure running it was not. Every application cycle started the same way: a flood of emails from applicants, staff copying and pasting information from those emails into a shared Google Sheet, and then someone manually checking whether each applicant actually qualified.
It worked. But only barely, and only because the team was working harder than they should have had to.
The eligibility screening alone was a meaningful time sink. Staff had to compare each application against a set of criteria covering age, geographic location, and household income. If an applicant did not qualify, someone had to write a response explaining that. If they did qualify, someone had to route that information to the right people and start chasing down supporting documents from partnering nonprofits.
The other problem was visibility. Leadership had no reliable way to see how many scholarships they could actually fund in a given cycle. Donation data lived in a separate platform. Without a real-time picture of funding levels, decisions about award amounts were slower and harder than they needed to be.
The ask was straightforward: automate the intake process, build in the screening logic, and give leadership the visibility they needed to plan with confidence.
I served as the sole Salesforce consultant on this engagement. That meant owning the full scope from discovery through delivery, including solution design, configuration, testing, and handoff to the Foundation's staff.
Specific responsibilities included:
Before touching any configuration, I spent time with the team understanding exactly how the process worked. That sounds obvious, but it is where a lot of these projects go sideways. Stakeholders describe the process they think they have, and the person building the solution takes that at face value. The reality is usually more complicated.
In this case, the team had a mix of formal eligibility criteria and informal judgment calls that had never been written down. Part of my job was surfacing those and getting agreement on which ones the system should enforce automatically and which ones required a human decision.
Once the requirements were locked, the solution design came together in three layers:
One thing I pushed for early was keeping the eligibility logic in a single Flow rather than scattered across multiple rules or custom objects. It made the system easier to audit and easier to update when criteria changed, which they do. Scholarship program requirements are not static. Building with maintainability in mind saved the team from having to bring someone back in every time a threshold shifted.
The integration with the donation platform required some coordination with the platform vendor to confirm the available data fields and refresh cadence. Once that was established, connecting it to the Salesforce dashboard was straightforward.
The final delivery included the following:
A public-facing application form structured to collect all required eligibility fields at submission. Data flowed directly into Salesforce with no manual data entry.
A record-triggered Salesforce Flow that evaluated each new application against defined criteria covering age ranges, geographic eligibility, and household income thresholds.
Email templates triggered by Flow outcomes. Declined applicants received a clear, respectful explanation. Qualified applicants received a confirmation and next steps.
Automated task creation and notification routing to Foundation staff and partner nonprofits when an application moved into the review stage.
A real-time Salesforce dashboard connected to the Foundation's donation platform, showing current funding levels alongside active application counts.
Written process documentation and a live walkthrough session for Foundation staff covering day-to-day management and common edge case handling.
The change in how the team spent their time was immediate. Staff went from managing a manual intake queue to reviewing a clean set of pre-screened, qualified applicants. The hours that had gone into copying emails into spreadsheets and writing individual decline responses were redirected toward higher-value work: deeper review of competitive applications and more active engagement with donors and partner organizations.
On the student side, the experience became more consistent. Applicants got a response quickly, regardless of where they were in the cycle. For students who did not qualify, a clear and timely explanation was a significant improvement over the previous silence.
Leadership gained something they did not have before: a clear picture of funding capacity tied to live donation data. That made planning conversations faster and more grounded.
Key takeaways from the engagement:
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