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Grant Application

Inspire Foundation

The Inspire Foundation is a unique organisation providing funding and life skills development assistance to young Cantabrians who possess unwavering commitment, determination and who show passion and skill in their field. With over 120 hundred grants already handed out in their 4 year history, the recipients have proven to be incredibly varied in talent, ranging from the arts to academia to sport.

As the next generation of sports heroes and global game changers reach the edge of greatness and before they achieve public success and support, there are very few options available to individuals to gain assistance.

The team at Inspire wanted to promote themselves and attract as many applications as possible. However the grant application process was manual and laborious for both prospective grantees and those at Inspire who were charged with assessing and approving them.

Grantees were required to complete a handwritten form which was then photocopied and key information shared amongst assessors and domain experts via spreadsheets. This process was tedious and was going to be a barrier if they were to achieve their goal of scaling their organisation.

We needed to bite if off in chunks. Logically getting the applications online and into an electronic format had to be first on the list.

stroke inspirefoundation.co.nz

Art Month Sydney Responsive Web Site

As with many applications for funding, there's a lot of information required from the applicant, as a result the forms tend to be quite long and involved.

When it came to the application form, the objective was to make it as easy as possible for grantees to apply. In order to do that, there were critical aspects that we needed to get right:

  • engaging : it must appeal strongly to the target audience aged 15-23 years, attention spans can be limited (even when asking for help)
  • practical : applicants need to be able to partially complete an application, save it, and come back later for completion and submission
  • validate : it must address as many of the incorrect application information issues as possible e.g. incorrect age range, missing information or supporting documents
  • logical workflow : there must be a logical and natural workflow that guides the applicant through the process

We looked around at other online forms and struggled to find much in the way of inspiration. So we had to think it up all by ourselves.

A challenge we weren't prepared for, was the incorporation of the Inspire Foundation brand colours – red and black. It was important to make the form feel very much part of the Inspire brand, but every time we attempted to use red in the form, even as an accent colour, it gave the appearance of an error.

Before we even showed the team at Inspire the first version, we had already overhauled the design 3 times, each time trying to get further into the head of our would-be users.

But perseverance pays off, and the result is a beautifully designed, easy to use application form with full validation and a strong connection to the Inspire Foundation brand.