Big Shoulders Fund Sees Exponential Growth of Scholarship Programming with FormAssembly

Case study snapshot

About Big Shoulders Fund

• Big Shoulders Fund is the largest K-12 scholarship organization in the city of Chicago.
• Since its founding in 1986, it has raised more than $400 million to create wider access to a network of quality schools for low-income students.
• Other areas of emphasis include scholastic support to students, enrichment programs, leadership development, and professional development for teachers.

Kate and the team at Big Shoulders Fund were first introduced to FormAssembly as they sought solutions to digitize the scholarship application processes and saw a way to integrate scholar data to Salesforce without securing additional Salesforce licenses. FormAssembly opened a door to partner with stakeholders in an efficient and productive way, without overextending the organization’s financial resources.

Additionally, Kate recognized the power of FormAssembly and Salesforce when the two platforms were implemented side-by-side. Automated processes could make critical tasks, such as handling and uploading scholarship applications, significantly easier on a staff that was accustomed to entering data manually.

The organization’s primary audience, students and scholars, could move during a scholarship cycle. This meant that potential scholarship recipients were not always available when funds were ready. To keep up with changing statuses, Big Shoulders Fund required a digital solution to replace the old on-paper processes.

“[FormAssembly] has truly transformed the Scholarship Team from a paper to a digital team,” LaMantia said.

Through Big Shoulders Fund, donors support up to 5,000 scholars per year. While these efforts do a significant amount of good within the Chicago education community, the behind-the-scenes work to collect applications and distribute funding is time-intensive.

The organization migrated from a system of paper application forms and Excel spreadsheets to seamlessly integrated data with FormAssembly and Salesforce. Not only did the new solution promote better data visibility, but it also helped mitigate problems when receiving thousands of incoming applications in a short window of time.

According to Kate, during the first year of automating the existing scholarship process, the team saw a 93% growth in scholarship funds requested.

“Automating our application not only allowed for growth, but seamless growth,” LaMantia said.

When they successfully launched the Tax Credit Scholarship application four years in a row, Big Shoulders Fund went from receiving roughly 3,000 applications in the 2017/2018 school year to receiving over 15,000 applications the following year.  Much of that increase occurred during one 24-hour period, with Big Shoulders Fund receiving over 11,000 applications in a single day. In fact, the organization received over 6,000 responses in the first hour alone!

These metrics represent a 300 percent increase in a single day when compared to the number of applications received for the entire previous academic year. Due to the popularity of the scholarship application, the second year resulted in more than 6,000 applications received in the first nine minutes alone (once the form was live), and the third year witnessed an even greater increase with more than 7,500 applications in the first nine minutes. The most recent application launch in January 2021 saw the greatest increase, thus far, with over 9,700 applications received in the first nine minutes.

“Without powerful systems in place like FormAssembly and Salesforce, we would have never been able to achieve these results,” LaMantia said.

In addition to tackling COVID-related issues as they emerge within the local education community, Kate hopes to branch out into other FormAssembly use cases. In the future, she hopes to help the group’s development team  utilize FormAssembly, since they recently transitioned to Salesforce, as well.