Akama Fund

Problem

One of the key missions of Akama Fund is to connect students with financial resources in an efficient and simple manner through a scholarship-based endowment process. However, students face numerous challenges with the endowment process. Current scholarship-based endowment processes are extremely complex, slow, and time-consuming which can add stress to the already-laborious schedule of university students. On the other side of the endowment process, Akama Fund also wants to ensure that funding from philanthropic donors, no matter how big or small, is allocated wisely so that each and every donor can make the largest impact possible. Similar to students, participating in the endowment process as a donor can be, in their own words, “time-consuming” and “clunky”, which can negatively impact the impact made. 

Solution 

We worked with Akama Fund to build a scalable and simple endowment facilitation web application called Donor Space. This tool greatly simplifies the scholarship creation and application processes for donors and students respectively. In essence, this platform will house many different scholarships for students to browse through and “one-click” apply so that the process is extremely quick on their end. On the other hand, Donor Space also contains an extremely helpful guide to creating scholarships within our platform with the Scholarship Consultant.

Design

Our users range from diverse backgrounds and have a variety of experiences with the endowment processes that currently exist. To ensure reliability and user-friendliness, Donor Space aims to create an easy-to-follow experience for donors and students of all backgrounds all the while ensuring that the basic necessities and information of a scholarship is communicated thoroughly. 

With respect to this, one of the key challenges of this project was making sure that all necessary information for a scholarship application is collected and there are numerous minute details involved, such as donor contact information, scholarship eligibility criterias, restrictions on the use of the scholarship’s fund, and more. To tackle this, we decided to split up these different categories into steps and created the “Scholarship Consultant” that was a unique and simple way of guiding donors through a simple process of creating a scholarship within Donor Space.

Tech Stack 

Our tech stack is built on top of the T3 stack with modern and reliable technologies such as Next.js, TypeScript, tRPC, and TailwindCSS for an efficient, typesafe application with a seamless developer experience. We've enhanced this foundation by integrating the shadcn/ui library for accessible and customizable UI components, Supabase for robust PostgreSQL hosting and storage solutions, and the Drizzle ORM for simplified database interactions. Additionally, we use Resend to handle email sending.