How Evergreen Valley Youth Alliance Took Re-Keying Out of Scholarship Season
By TwinStack Team
At a glance
| Organisation | Evergreen Valley Youth Alliance, a regional youth-development nonprofit |
|---|---|
| Team | 14 staff and about 60 volunteers |
| Use case | Annual scholarship application intake |
| Salesforce object | Custom object: Scholarship Application |
| Features used | Conditional questions, file uploads, fixed-record lookup, Turnstile spam check, automatic close time |
Evergreen Valley Youth Alliance is a fictional organisation, and the figures shown illustrate typical results.
About Evergreen Valley Youth Alliance
Evergreen Valley Youth Alliance runs mentoring, tutoring and scholarship programs for young people across its region. Its small operations team already managed donors, volunteers and program participants in Salesforce, so Salesforce was the natural home for scholarship applications too. It was just that applications weren’t getting there on their own.
The challenge
Each spring the Alliance received more than two thousand scholarship applications through a general-purpose online form. Responses landed in a spreadsheet, and a staff member then re-keyed each one into Salesforce. Transcripts arrived separately by email and had to be matched by hand.
“By the time an application became a record, it was often three days old,” said Maya Okafor, Programs Operations Manager. “And by then we’d already lost track of which ones were missing documents.”
The numbers told the same story. About 31% of applications were missing key details, and roughly 15% of entries in the queue were junk submissions from bots. Reviewers spent the first week of every cycle cleaning data instead of reading applications.
Why Smart Forms & Surveys
The Alliance wanted the form to create the application record directly, without another tool to buy, secure and connect. Because Smart Forms & Surveys runs natively on Salesforce, it could create a Scholarship Application record for every submission, and the team’s existing admins could build and own it.
The solution
The team built one form that creates a Scholarship Application record per submission, then used four capabilities to make it work for applicants.
Conditional questions
An “Applying as” picklist shows school questions to high school seniors and college questions to current students, so no one wades through fields that don’t apply to them.
File uploads
Applicants attach their transcript and up to two supporting documents to the application itself, and the files are linked to the new record.
A fixed-record lookup
Every application is linked automatically to the 2027 Scholarship Program, so applicants never see or choose a record Id.
Spam protection and a deadline
Cloudflare Turnstile keeps bots out, and the form’s close time was set to the application deadline, so it shuts itself at the right moment.
Staff tested the form in Visitor view, submitted a few trial applications and checked the Submissions list before sharing the link in the Alliance’s newsletter and on its website.
The results
In the first full cycle the Alliance received 2,140 applications. Every one arrived in Salesforce as a record, with its documents attached, the moment the applicant clicked Submit.
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Time from submission to reviewable record | About 3 days | Same day |
| Staff time spent re-keying | About 6 minutes per application | None |
| Applications missing key details | 31% | 6% |
| Junk entries in the queue | About 15% | Under 1% |
Removing about six minutes of re-keying from 2,140 applications saved roughly 200 staff hours. Applications were also more complete, because required fields and conditional questions guided applicants through the form.
“Reviewers open an application and everything is already there: the answers, the transcript, the program it belongs to. We spend scholarship season reading, not copying.”
What’s next
The Alliance is now using the same approach for volunteer sign-ups and mentor intake, building each form in Smart Forms & Surveys so every response arrives as a Salesforce record.
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