How a Nonprofit Used Low-Code to Send More Kids to School

According to UNESCO, there were 263 million out-of-school children, adolescents and youth in 2016—a statistic that has “barely changed” in recent years.

One of the main reasons is poverty.

In the United States alone, about 15 million children – or 21% of all American kids – live in families below the federal poverty threshold and are at risk of skipping or dropping out from the basic school systems.

Nonprofit group Seeds of Hope is doing its share to reverse this trend and is using Caspio’s low-code platform to make it happen.

Schedule a free demo to see how Caspio helps nonprofits build web applications without coding.

Jumpstarting School for Kids in Need

Seeds of Hope of Northern Colorado is a nonprofit organization (NGO) that helps children gain access to education. They aid low-income families, regardless of religious background, through 34 partner Catholic schools. They also provide grants directly to schools for repairs and technology upgrades. Since their founding in 1996, they have helped 23,000 students and provided $35 million in financial assistance.

As they continued with their scholarship program, Seeds of Hope needed a tool to better manage resources and allocate the right size of grant funding to families.

Gina Wilson, the group’s director of allocations and partnerships, addressed that need by building a custom app with Caspio’s low-code platform.

Finding the Best Tuition Right-Sizing Tool

Seeds of Hope uses a need-based system in granting scholarships.

With this system, they look at a family’s data, check it against a school’s tuition, and identify the disparity from the actual cost to educate a child. For example, if the actual cost to educate is $6,500 and the tuition is $3,500, they can allocate $3,000 to a family to help make up the difference.

Wilson initially searched for a vendor to custom-build the application that would support this needs-based model. She found one. But as time went by, she noticed things weren’t going as planned. For instance, it had become difficult to take necessary deductions for various expenses that some families have, such as elevated household costs and existing college or high school tuition.

Frustrated, Wilson sought out another solution to create a customized tuition right-sizing app. She came across Caspio and was impressed with how easy it was to build powerful applications without having to write code.

Building a Custom Tuition Calculator Without Coding

Fascinated, Wilson immediately decided Caspio was the tool she’s looking for.

“Before, we were using a solution that we couldn’t customize and would frequently break. And now with Caspio, I’m empowered to customize my solutions and to fix them,” she said.

Wilson surmounted bumps in the road during the web app development process thanks to free training resources and assistance from the Caspio Support Team.

“Resolving problems is as easy as a quick search on the website or a quick chat with Caspio Support,” she said. She also emphasized the importance of online resources in accelerating her learning curve, particularly the video tutorials on YouTube.

Sowing a Brighter Future for Students, Parishes

Through Caspio’s feature-rich, low-code platform, Wilson successfully built a custom scholarship right-sizing app that allows them to calculate appropriate assistance for families in the community.

They save time, money and effort because they no longer needed to use a one-size-fits-all “solution” that frequently broke and didn’t cater to their exact requirements.  

Inspired and motivated by what she accomplished, she also sees plenty of opportunities for building applications that not only help students, schools and families, but also parishes and their local diocese.

Wilson described Caspio as “incredibly important” to the continuous success of their advocacy campaigns at Seeds of Hope.

 “I really see a great future with Caspio,” she said.

Create No-Code Solutions for Your Nonprofit Today

NGOs are making the world a better place and they need all the help they can get to continue with their good deeds. In the case of Seeds of Hope, they needed a custom online database application to better manage their needs-based scholarship model—and they built exactly what they required with Caspio’s low-code platform.

Caspio combines a robust online database, a visual point-and-click application builder and scalable cloud infrastructure, allowing you to develop powerful custom web apps in a fraction of the time.

 

Due to its ease of use, even business developers who have no prior experience coding are able to build robust applications, just like Seeds of Hope’s Wilson.

We’ve served several nonprofits from the United States and globally, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID and World Vision. And to further help NGOs, we also offer a special discount for nonprofit organizations, which you can request when you’re ready to open a plan.

For now, feel free to schedule a demo with one of our experts to see how Caspio helps nonprofit groups build custom applications without coding.