Building a Grant Application System That Distributed $680k to Minority Entrepreneurs

The Challenge

A leading non-profit needed to distribute roughly $700k in grant funding to minority entrepreneurs — fast. Its existing grant application process was manual and legacy: repetitive data entry, multiple hand-offs, and no integrated view of where any application stood.

Four constraints shaped the project:

• Secure data collection and management. Applications involved sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) and banking details, which had to be collected and managed securely.
• A condensed timeline with a hard launch date. Requirements gathering and change management had to happen inside a fixed 10-week window — the launch date could not move.
• Heavy manual process steps in the legacy system. The old process depended on many manual steps that needed to be optimized or automated away.
• Repetitive data entry versus data integrity. The applicant experience needed streamlining without compromising the accuracy of the data collected.

The Solution

I designed an end-to-end grant application system on Qualtrics and Salesforce that replaced the manual legacy process with an integrated, automated pipeline. Six components carried the load:

• SSO identity validation — single sign-on to securely validate each applicant's identity before sensitive data was collected.
• Application intake survey with automated eligibility screening — integrated with the CRM and database, so ineligible applications were declined automatically and eligible ones flowed straight into review.
• Grant reviewer ticketing — a ticketing workflow that automated application assessment tracking, letting a two-person review team work through hundreds of applications.
• Stage-based email notifications — applicants were kept informed automatically as their application moved through each stage.
• An operational analytics dashboard — end-to-end visibility across the whole application pipeline for the program team.
• Self-serve FAQ and help content — deflecting support queries before they reached the team.

SSO identity validation

Intake survey + eligibility screening

Grant reviewer ticketing

Stage-based email notifications

Operational analytics dashboard

Self-serve FAQ & help content

The Results

The system distributed $680k in grant funds to 100 minority entrepreneurs. It processed 700 applications with only two human reviewers: automated eligibility screening declined 173 applications outright, and the reviewer ticketing workflow created and closed 235 review tickets for the rest.

Applications received 700

Auto-declined 173

Review tickets 235

Funded 100 · $680k

The whole system went from design to launch in 10 weeks, meeting the non-profit's hard deadline. Beyond the numbers, the project embedded trust in the organization's ability to deliver on its mission, accelerated a data- and technology-driven culture internally, and left behind a reusable product — both the system and the process around it — for future grant rounds.

Lessons That Carried Forward

• Gathering full requirements upfront from all stakeholders minimizes change requests and protects timelines and costs.
• The constraints of a new system — and how they affect historical workflows — need to be researched and communicated early.
• Open, continuous communication across stakeholders is what keeps a fixed-deadline project aligned.
• Operational and feedback analytics should keep improving the product after launch.

Tools & Skills