Child's Play Grant Portal

Child's Play donates therapeutic games and technology to pediatric hospitals worldwide, funded by the gaming community. Behind that mission sat a grant program serving 150+ hospitals and their foundations, running on a legacy platform that never fit their needs, a student-built prototype, spreadsheets, and email threads. Critical decisions about funding for sick kids depended on manual follow-ups and one team's inbox.

That changed with a single platform built on Softr and Softr Database. Hospital and foundation contacts now log in, keep their own organizational data current, apply to open grant programs across three funding cycles (cash grants tied to bed count, personnel grants for dedicated gaming specialists, and equipment grants for consoles and accessibility devices), upload receipts, and submit impact reports without anyone chasing them.

For the Child's Play team, the invisible work disappeared. Applications flow into structured review queues with multi-reviewer scoring and ranking. Compliance is tracked at the hospital level and enforced automatically through role-based access. Softr Workflows detect changes in incoming applications, sync master records, and notify the team. The follow-up emails that used to run the program now send themselves.

The clearest before-and-after is spending visibility. Where the team once pieced together donor impact from static charts, a custom dashboard built with Vibe Coding now answers "where did the money go?" across ~900 line items: by company, category, hospital, and state, with interactive filtering and one-click export for donor reporting.

What started as a student capstone project is now a production system with 27+ delivered features. The migration to Softr Database consolidated everything into one platform, eliminated the Airtable subscription, and set the foundation for retiring their legacy grant software entirely.