How a State Education Department Got Thousands of Hours Back

When one grant specialist stepped into her new role with a state education department, she knew she had her work cut out for her. Her role is to manage a scholarship program that provides funding for low-income students to attend private schools.

As part of the Department of Education, the high-profile program faces scrutiny from every angle—legislators, parents, school administrators, and the media.

What she found was a program in need of an update. The team was getting the work done, but the manual tasks frequently piled up, adding stress and making it challenging to deliver funds when families needed them. She knew there had to be a better way and took it upon herself to find it.

The cost of avoiding procurement at all costs

For government agencies, software procurement can be a nightmare. With so many layers of review, teams do everything they can to avoid it. That makes sense. But this grant specialist knew the current software was holding the team back. Procuring new software was the only way forward.

She was in the ideal position to usher in a change. As she was somewhat new to the role, she brought a fresh perspective. Plus, she understood right away the true cost of avoiding procurement—real people were facing barriers to get the money they needed.

Though she was optimistic, she understood the obstacles built into the process. If she was going to go through the gauntlet of finding new software, it would have to be worth the effort. She and her team identified their top goals.

1. Eliminate human error

When tasks are manual, government grant programs can become the perfect environment for human error. People are under pressure to move fast, at high volume. Mistakes can easily happen. With the high visibility, the team knew they couldn't take this risk any longer.

To review applications for the funding program, a team member had to manually search for and transcribe information from tax records. That task translated into thousands of hours of work. And one small mistake could lead to very real consequences for applicants. One of the first phone calls the grant specialist received on the job was from an upset mother whose child didn't get funding. Upon further investigation, she found that the student did qualify, but was denied because of a simple human error—the type of mistake that happens when a small team is under intense pressure.

With less than three full-time employees dedicated to the program, all that work fell to just a couple of people. And every minute they had their heads down, other requests piled up. "Families were waiting weeks for us to get back to them because we were looking at tax records," she says.

The team needed to automate the data extraction process. The automations had to pull data from tax documents and populate it into applications. With that in place, they could claw back thousands of hours of time and eliminate the risk of human error in the process.

2. Create a smooth applicant experience

The software the program used in the past made the scholarship application an often  confusing, disjointed experience for applicants.

Though some of the problems seemed like simple design issues, the grant specialist understood the stakes. "When the application is clunky and difficult to follow, and you don't know where to click, it's frustrating for applicants," she says. She wanted applying to be as easy as possible for families who needed assistance.

Part of the issue was communication between the department and applicants. Messaging didn't happen within the application platform. Any back-and-forth was via email, which created inconsistencies. The team couldn't easily access past correspondence with applicants. And applicants couldn't rely on their messages being documented and passed between team members.

The team needed in-app messaging that would link communication history to an application, so both the reviewers and applicants had transparency. And they needed an application that felt intuitive for everyone.

3. Clean up the data

The scholarship program's long-term success hinged upon clean, clear data. "We needed to be able to aggregate data—median household income, median household size, whether students were renewals or not, whether they were the sibling of a renewal, whether they attended a private school or a public school last year, whether they were in a daycare, their race, and their ethnicity," the grant specialist says.

Unfortunately, in the past, getting clean data was incredibly difficult. The whole process was cumbersome and prone to error. "With our previous vendor, if parents entered a name with a special character with an accent, hyphen, or an apostrophe, it would glitch," she says.

If the data wasn't accurate and accessible, the team couldn't rely on it.

Beyond just clean data for reporting, the team needed the ability to easily sort applicants to move the program forward. The right solution would need to have labels the team could use to categorize applicants and take bulk actions. Data had to be clean and reliable, so the team could get the information they needed whenever they needed it.

Automation + a human touch

What the team needed most of all was a solution that balanced the technical details with the human experience.

As much as they were ready to automate manual tasks, they also needed real people to help guide them through the transformation. A support chatbot wasn't going to cut it. "With some companies that provide an online service, it sometimes can be difficult to reach a person," the grant specialist says. "There's either no dedicated contact person or they send you to a live chat feature where you can call a 1-800 number."

As she worked to build a new application process, she got to know her dedicated support and implementation teams. She didn't just have a general email address. She knew their names, knew how to reach people directly.

That personal contact meant that when she hit an unexpected roadblock, she had someone to reach out to. For instance, when the team realized that families who had multiple children applying needed a more customized notification than they'd designed, she didn't have to do it manually. She reached out to the implementation team to help build a tool quickly to tweak the communication for those families.

Change is hard—not changing is harder

In the public sector, it's common to hear agencies getting stuck with outdated technology. Yes, procurement can be a hassle. But sticking with bad software is a hassle too—one that doesn't end until you end it.

With all requirements in mind, the team chose to move forward with a new software solution—Submittable. The grant specialist and her team worked seamlessly with the vendor's team to create the automations, applicant experience, and centralized communication process the department needed.

After taking the plunge, the scholarship program saw a huge spike in applications—2,000 more than the previous year, a 66% increase. It turns out that making the applicant experience better and more accessible lets more people in the door. That year, 2,275 low-income students were given a scholarship. And having new software and workflows in place saved the state education department thousands of hours.

And all that time the department saves? Now it can go to helping more people get the support they need. "Every hour that we don't have to spend working on something else, is time we can spend answering parent phone calls, and addressing reporting and eligibility issues, which affects students getting the money," the grant specialist says.

The department plans to keep the momentum going. They're taking everything they learned from the transition and continuing to evolve their processes. Along the way, they've found that pivoting away from the "way we've always done it" mentality really opens up the possibilities.