Bold.org — Rethinking Application Review for Donors

As application volume grew into the hundreds and thousands per scholarship, the existing list-based workflow could no longer support fast, consistent review. We redesigned the experience to help donors focus on the strongest candidates, stay in context, and make confident decisions at scale.

Bold.org supports both individual donors and large organizations (brands, companies, and foundations) with team accounts. As application volume per scholarship grew to hundreds and thousands, reviewing became slow and inconsistent—especially for team donor accounts with multiple reviewers.

We redesigned application management to help donors make confident decisions at scale:

Bold.org is a scholarship platform where donors fund scholarships for students. What started as a simple “launch a scholarship” flow evolved into ongoing scholarship programs — and that’s where review became the operational bottleneck.

When each scholarship receives hundreds to thousands of applications, the traditional list-based review collapses. We saw four recurring breakdowns:

As we scaled, the donor experience had to shift from “a dashboard” to workflow software. Large donors wanted a system that helps them make decisions quickly, confidently, and repeatedly.

I owned the end-to-end design, which included user research, mapping donor review workflows, synthesizing insights from user and operational data, designing the information architecture and interaction patterns, and partnering with Donor Team and engineering on execution.

We redesigned the Donor Platform layout and navigation around the core donor flows, creating a cleaner, more focused workspace. By reducing visual clutter and keeping the interface centered on what donors actually need to accomplish, the product feels simpler today and leaves clear space to add future features.

When you have thousands of applications to review, just "sorting" them is a huge task. The Recommended tab is designed to quickly get donors to the most promising candidates. We trained the AI engine to analyze the application itself, along with every relevant signal from the scholarship page and both donor and student profiles.

This reduces cognitive load and time spent on discovery. Instead of sifting through a large pool, the UX immediately presents a curated, high-quality shortlist, accelerating the decision-making process. The "clear reasons" enhance transparency and trust in the system's recommendations.

For most donors and managers, selecting finalists and winners is important and often emotional, so the AI is tuned to keep the recommended applications broad enough to offer genuine choice while ensuring the list is not overwhelming.

Donors stay in full control and can override the AI’s suggestion. Any time a donor adds a high rating or a positive note, we adjust the recommendation list and engine settings for that specific donor.

To simplify the applications list view, I made a deliberate tradeoff: keep the list lightweight and scannable, and move deep context and all actions into a slide-in details view.

The list became a fast triage surface: more applicants visible per screen, consistent columns, and a clear starting point.

Clicking any applicant opens the full application + detailed student profile in one view.

The user always sees the applications list, which helps them stay in context.

Donors can move through review with a Previous / Next navigator at the bottom—so they don’t have to bounce back to the list after each read.

To address team inconsistency, we added lightweight collaboration tools that are optional:

The redesigned workflow became the default for 10,000+ donor accounts, helping donors review candidates independently while saving each Donor Team member 12–16 hours per week.