Grantee Onboarding Automation

The Problem

When a new customer signed a 12-month contract, they expected to start using the platform. What actually happened was a month of waiting. Four weeks from contract start to users being live, with two of those weeks spent on just getting user accounts created.

The customers were foundations supporting networks of nonprofits. To get those nonprofits onto the platform, the CS team had to work through a process that touched almost every team and system. They would receive a spreadsheet of nonprofits, manually clean and reshape it to get it into the CRM, reach out to collect opt-ins, build a new spreadsheet from the results, hand that off to a solutions engineer to run custom bash scripts that created the accounts, then upload the results again so marketing had what they needed to send welcome campaigns and CS could manage the accounts going forward. Every step was manual. There was no data validation, no cleanup, and any mistake meant going back and starting over.

Two weeks of calendar time, multiple people involved, and a new customer already burning through their term before their users had ever logged in.

Version 1: Retool Portal

The first step was working closely with the CS team to map the entire process end to end and identify exactly where time was being lost. The answer was everywhere: every handoff between teams, every manual list manipulation, every upload that could have been automated.

I built a Retool portal that connected directly to the CRM and the platform. Instead of receiving a spreadsheet and spending days manipulating it, CS could upload the nonprofit list directly into Retool. The portal validated the data, cleaned it up, and caught duplicates or bad records before anything touched the CRM. Marketing now had a clean, accurate list to run their opt-in campaign without waiting on anyone.

As opt-in responses came in, the CRM updated automatically. CS no longer had to build new lists or track results manually. They could go back into Retool at any point, see exactly who was part of the original list and who had opted in, and when they were ready, click a single button to provision all of the users into the platform. The CRM updated again automatically with the new account data, onboarding dates, and landing page information so marketing could send welcome emails and CS had everything they needed to manage the accounts.

What had taken two weeks of back-and-forth across multiple teams now took CS under an hour.

Version 2: Funder Self-Serve

A few years later, the engineering team added the ability for funders to upload their own user lists directly inside the application. I built a webhook integration that listened for those uploads and handed them off to Retool, which ran the same validation and data cleanup logic and created the accounts automatically.

This removed CS from the provisioning process entirely. Funders no longer had to contact anyone to add new users to the platform. There was also no longer a cap on the number of nonprofits a funder could have. Before, limits existed in part because of the overhead of managing large lists manually. With self-serve provisioning, funders could bring their entire grantee base onto the platform and add new organizations whenever they needed to.

How It Works

Version 1

1. CS uploads the nonprofit list into the Retool portal
2. Retool validates and cleans the data, flagging errors before anything reaches the CRM
3. Marketing uses the clean list to run the opt-in campaign
4. As opt-ins come in, the CRM updates automatically
5. CS clicks one button in Retool to provision all opted-in users
6. CRM updates with account data, onboarding dates, and landing pages for marketing and CS

Version 2

1. Funder uploads their user list directly inside the application
2. The app sends a webhook to Retool with the upload data
3. Retool validates, cleans, and provisions the accounts automatically
4. No CS involvement required

The Outcome

The first version cut the two-week provisioning process down to under an hour. The second version eliminated it entirely. Customers who used to lose a month of their 12-month contract before their users were live could now start in earnest from day one.

The CS team stopped spending time on data manipulation and list management. Marketing always had accurate, up-to-date information without waiting for manual updates. And funders gained the ability to grow their presence on the platform on their own schedule, without limits.