Grant Management System for a Student Union

CBS Students is the student union at Copenhagen Business School (CBS). On behalf of the university, CBS Students oversees a student activity fund of ~300 000 USD.

The Head of Secretariat of CBS Students was having trouble with the admin workload associated with running the fund. The process was hand-held and manual, leading to misplaced documents, human error and world of pain for everyone involved.

With input from CBS Students, we used Notion, Zapier and Google Workspace tools (Drive, Sheets, Forms) to develop a streamlined system for managing the fund, cutting down over 10hrs/week of manual work.

Documented the old system (what's the status quo, exploring the biggest pains and bottlenecks, mapping out dependencies and needs)

Co-developed the new process (on a regular cadence, I checked in with progress, and asked for feedback)

Testing (first internal testing by the team, then a final release of the system)

Monitoring and support (making sure the system works as expected in the real world)

Going from manually transcribing PDFs to automatically receiving structured data in a Notion database

Automatic notifications for stakeholders, to inform them about the status of their funds

Easy export and reporting for the yearly audit

Notes and documentation from the old system

Documentation and training on the new system

The new system

Google Forms to structure data collection for applications and final reports

Notion databases to manage all applications for funds and their status

Zapier to connect systems together, and automatic notifications