Scholarship Application Workflow
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The organisation needed a way to process a very high volume of scholarship applications within a short time window, without increasing reliance on manual checks, spreadsheets, or email-driven workflows. Existing admissions systems contained the required applicant and programme data, but extending Dataverse or Dynamics 365 with new custom components was not viable due to cost, risk, and delivery timelines.
Any solution also needed to balance competing priorities: providing applicants with a clear and simple application journey, while ensuring submissions could be validated, enriched, and assessed consistently against authoritative data sources. At the same time, staff required a structured, auditable process for reviewing eligibility, managing outcomes, and issuing offers at scale.
The challenge was therefore to design a reliable, end-to-end scholarship process that could operate at high volume, integrate cleanly with existing systems, and reduce operational effort—without introducing new platform dependencies or long-term maintenance overhead.
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I designed and delivered a fully automated, end-to-end scholarship application framework built entirely on existing Microsoft Power Platform capabilities and institutional tooling. The solution provides applicants with a streamlined submission experience, while automatically validating, enriching, and cross-referencing their data against authoritative records held in Dataverse.
Behind the scenes, the workflow orchestrates application intake, eligibility assessment, staff review, and offer issuance through a consistent and auditable process. Automation replaces manual reconciliation and ad-hoc decision-making, enabling teams to manage large application volumes efficiently and with confidence.
The result is a cost-effective, scalable solution capable of handling thousands of applications within days of launch, maintaining data integrity throughout the lifecycle, and delivering a smooth, reliable experience for both applicants and staff—without requiring custom development in Dataverse or Dynamics 365.
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Gecko Engage – captures scholarship applications via high-volume webforms
SharePoint – stores submitted data in structured intake and processing lists
Power Automate – orchestrates validation, enrichment, scoring, and notifications
Dataverse / Dynamics 365 – provides authoritative student and programme data
Power BI – delivers operational and management reporting, tracking application volumes, processing times, outcomes, and conversion from offer to acceptance
Azure API Management – enables secure, scalable, and controlled data connections
Exchange Shared Mailboxes – sends automated, branded scholarship communications
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The previous process relied on spreadsheets, manual lookups, and mail merges, which made scholarship administration slow, error-prone, and difficult to scale during peak periods.
The automated workflow removed all manual data handling, validating and enriching applications automatically and generating consistent scholarship offers without staff intervention. This ensured data accuracy, reduced operational risk, and created a repeatable process that staff could trust.
Within the first few weeks of launch, the solution successfully processed well over 2,000 scholarship applications. Based on current submission rates, it is projected to handle more than 10,000 applications within the next four months, reducing processing time from days to minutes and enabling the team to operate at scale with confidence.
Scroll through the page or take me straight to:
Submit a scholarship application
Capture a new scholarship application to start the workflow.Processing the application
Simulated flow enriches the application and sends a confirmation.Applicant confirmation
How the applicant would see the initial confirmation.Hi Applicant,
Thanks for your application. We are reviewing it and will get back to you.
You can close this preview and move to the next step of the simulation to see how the back end behaves.
Best wishes
Dau Automation Scholarship Service
Sending the decision
Flow generates a secure response token and sends a personalised outcome.Outcome communication
What the applicant receives, based on the decision selected above.Writing back to SharePoint
The applicant response is recorded and surfaced for reporting.Journey overview
Side panel summarises each stage of the workflow.A high volume scholarship intake process rebuilt into a fully automated, scalable workflow that validates applications, enriches data from Dynamics 365 and prepares everything for staff without adding pressure to core systems.
Background
The organisation needed an automated and reliable way to manage several thousand scholarship applications each year. Existing processes were heavily manual and depended on spreadsheets, email-based submissions and ad-hoc checks, which made the workflow difficult to scale during peak periods. Staff were spending significant time reconciling data, verifying applicant details and applying scoring rules that varied between programmes.
Although Dynamics 365 contained much of the underlying applicant and programme data, there was no budget or appetite to extend the platform with new custom tables, plugins or a public-facing portal. Any change to the core system would have required development time, regression testing and ongoing support, all of which were outside the scope of the admissions cycle.
The Admissions team therefore needed a solution that could be implemented quickly, would integrate cleanly with existing systems and could operate at high volume without adding extra load to Dynamics 365. It also needed to validate submissions automatically, pull accurate data from Dataverse and prepare applications in a consistent, structured format for downstream decision-making.
This combination of constraints shaped the design of a lightweight but highly scalable architecture, where the intake process remains external, validation and enrichment are automated and SharePoint serves as the operational workspace for staff.
The application form
Design decisions and safeguards
Designed for sustained high volume (around 1,000 applications per week), fast turnaround, and safe operations. Automated enrichment and scoring support staff assessment while keeping communications secure and auditable.
Built for sustained volume
Designed to handle consistent high intake without manual handling or spreadsheet reconciliation.
Authoritative data alignment
Enrichment pulls verified applicant and programme details from Dataverse, with SharePoint as the operational workspace.
Assisted assessment model
Workflows apply scoring rubrics and produce a recommended score for staff to review, keeping decision control with the team.
Delta sync and re scoring
Daily refresh and on-demand reprocessing supports new documentation without rebuilding records or losing traceability.
Defensive scoring behaviour
If a score is unavailable, a safe fallback is applied and the record is clearly flagged for staff review.
Secure applicant responses
Accept or decline links are fronted by Azure API Management with flow generated response tokens for controlled access.
Fail safely, never silently
If email delivery or document generation fails, the case is flagged for review with error details recorded.
Operational reporting built in
Power BI tracks volumes, timings, award totals, remaining budget, domicile trends, and offer acceptance behaviour.
Licensing aware design
Avoids custom Dynamics development and supports mixed licensing realities while still delivering end to end automation.
Validated at real scale
Scoring logic and workflow behaviour were tested against over 20,000 real applications prior to go live.
The scholarship application begins with a high-volume webform built in Gecko Engage. Gecko was selected because it provides a stable and scalable form engine that can handle peak submission periods without performance issues. It also supports webhook notifications, custom field logic and reliable data delivery, which made it well-suited for a workflow that needed to process hundreds of applications within minutes.
The form captures key applicant information and programme identifiers, along with any criteria required for scoring and eligibility checks. Once submitted, Gecko sends the data directly to the workflow using a webhook. No data is stored in Gecko beyond the initial submission, and no custom development was required on the CRM side. The aim was to create an external intake mechanism that could operate at scale without increasing load on Dynamics 365 or the internal systems.
This approach decouples the submission layer from the processing engine and ensures that the intake experience remains fast, reliable and user friendly, even during periods of very high demand.
Scholarship Reporting and Insights
Power BI provides a secure reporting layer over the scholarship dataset, giving teams visibility of volume, outcomes and operational performance. Live dashboards cannot be shown publicly, so this interactive demo illustrates the types of measures, drilldowns and stakeholder views that sit behind the scenes.
Applications received
Live volume
By intake, course and scholarship scheme
Offers issued
Fully tracked
Issue date, status and downstream activity
Acceptance rate
Calculated
Accept vs decline trends over time
Time to decision
Measured
Submission to outcome, with SLA views
Key reporting dimensions
Scholarship scheme, course and level of study, applicant domicile and fee status, agent involvement, offer and response timelines, plus operational workload and peaks. Filters enable stakeholder views without exposing sensitive row-level details.
Security and governance
Reports sit in a controlled workspace with permissions and row-level security. Only authorised teams can access applicant-level data, while shared measures and definitions keep reporting consistent across audiences.
Scholarship-driven conversion lag
This measure tracks how long it takes an applicant to move from not accepted to accepted after receiving a scholarship offer. It is calculated as the time between the scholarship offer issue timestamp and the subsequent acceptance timestamp, limited to applicants who accept after the scholarship is issued.
Median time to accept
7 days
After scholarship offer is issued
75th percentile
14 days
Shows the tail of slower conversions
Within selected window
62%
Acceptance within X days
Volume in view
High
Counts update with filters
Interactive window filter
Move the slider to simulate a reporting slicer. The KPIs update to reflect the selected window, similar to how a Power BI measure responds to filters.
Distribution of acceptance timing
Operational performance views
Reporting supports workload and quality monitoring, including volumes by stage, ageing of cases, throughput by intake, and peaks that inform resourcing. Measures can also surface exceptions such as missing data, delayed outcomes or incomplete audit fields.
Designed for stakeholders
Views are built for different audiences, from day to day operational tracking to senior performance summaries. Common measures and shared definitions keep reporting consistent when multiple teams consume the same dataset.
From submission to assessment in seconds
Gecko Engage form submitted
Authenticated webhook trigger
Starts scholarship scoring workflow
- Receive authenticated webhook from Gecko.
- Parse and normalise the JSON payload into a consistent schema.
- Match the applicant using Dataverse contact data, requiring at least three matching fields.
- If identity check passes, continue to data enrichment.
- If identity check fails, send a guidance email and create an entry in the unverified application log for reporting and future UX development.
- Query remaining Dataverse tables linked to the applicant.
- Retrieve programme, eligibility and scoring inputs required by the rules engine.
- Parse and transform enriched inputs into a standard internal model.
- Apply scholarship scoring rules and calculate award values.
- Create a SharePoint application record for the applicant.
- Store enriched data and calculated scores for downstream processing and audit.
- Send an application received email to the applicant.
- Confirm that their scholarship application has been captured for review.
When an applicant submits the scholarship form in Gecko Engage, the data is delivered instantly to the processing workflow through an authenticated webhook. The workflow parses the incoming JSON payload and performs an identity verification check by matching at least three key fields against the Dataverse contact table. This prevents duplicate or incorrect records from entering the system. Submissions that cannot be verified are logged separately, and applicants receive guidance on how to resubmit with correct details.
For verified applicants, the workflow enriches the submission by querying several Dataverse tables to retrieve programme information, eligibility data and the inputs required for scoring. These values are then processed through a scoring engine that applies institutional rules and calculates the final score for the application.
Once the data is enriched and scored, a complete application record is created in SharePoint. This record contains all the details needed for staff review and workflow tracking. The applicant then receives an automatic confirmation email, and the application becomes immediately available to teams for assessment.
This approach keeps the submission experience fast, supports high volumes reliably and ensures that every application entering the system has been validated, enriched and prepared for consistent downstream processing.
Delta data refresh
This workflow implements a high-performance delta sync pattern that keeps existing SharePoint application records aligned with the authoritative data stored in Dataverse. Admissions teams work primarily from SharePoint, so the workflow focuses on refreshing any items where the Dataverse data is more than 24 hours old. This ensures staff always work from current scoring and eligibility information rather than from stale values.
The process begins by retrieving only the SharePoint items that have not had their Dataverse values refreshed within the last 24 hours. These items include an internal timestamp or marker that indicates when the last Dataverse sync was completed. The workflow loads these records and builds lookup dictionaries (idArray, spIdMap, spHashMap) to match each SharePoint record with its Dataverse row and the previously stored Etag.
Dataverse is queried in controlled batches using FetchXML. For each returned record, the workflow compares the current Dataverse Etag with the cached SharePoint Etag. If the Etags match, the SharePoint item already reflects the most recent Dataverse data and the record is skipped. If the Etags differ, the record is added to an update list that represents the changes that must be written back to SharePoint.
A batch update engine then creates REST $batch requests, allowing many SharePoint items to be updated in a single HTTP call instead of thousands of individual connector actions. This approach reduces API usage, avoids throttling and keeps the workflow fast even when processing large daily volumes.
By refreshing only the SharePoint records whose Dataverse data is older than 24 hours, and by updating only the items where change has actually been detected, the workflow ensures that operational teams always see the most accurate and current information without unnecessary system load.
Scholarship Offer Automation
SharePoint offer action
User triggers scholarship offer from SharePoint
Starts offer issuance workflow
- Offer command is triggered from the SharePoint scholarship application list.
- Power Automate flow starts with the context of the selected item.
- Populate a Microsoft Word template with applicant and award data.
- Convert the populated document to a PDF award letter.
- Check if an agency is associated with this application.
- If an agency exists, prepare an information email for the agent.
- If no agency is recorded, skip this notification step.
- Create a cryptographically secure response token linked to this offer.
- Embed the token in a unique URL used to record accept or decline responses.
- Build a fully branded HTML offer email to the applicant.
- Attach the generated PDF scholarship award letter.
- Include accept and decline links that contain the secure response token.
- If applicable, send a separate notification email to the agent.
- Attach the final PDF award letter to the SharePoint application record.
- Write back the offer issued date and any related metadata.
- Leave the item ready for response tracking flows to update the outcome.
This workflow shows how a scholarship offer is issued in a controlled, auditable way using Power Automate and SharePoint as the operational backbone. An offer is triggered directly from the application record, automatically generating a personalised award letter, handling agency logic where required, and issuing secure response links for the applicant. Every step is designed to reduce manual handling while maintaining data integrity, branding consistency and traceability, ensuring offers are issued quickly, securely and with a clear audit trail for staff to rely on.
Secure Applicant Response Architecture
Applicant response link
Applicant clicks secure link in offer email
Routed through Azure API Management
- Applicant clicks the response link that points to an Azure API Management endpoint.
- APIM validates the request and token, applies policies such as rate limiting and IP or header checks.
- Back end flow endpoints are never exposed directly, which keeps the response channel locked down.
- APIM forwards the validated call to a Power Automate instant flow that is triggered when an HTTP request is received.
- The flow reads the secure response token and scholarship context.
- It returns a lightweight branded HTML page that asks the applicant to confirm if they want to accept their scholarship.
- The applicant sees a simple, fully branded card that summarises their scholarship offer.
- Two clear actions are presented: accept the scholarship or decline it.
- Clicking either option sends a new request back through Azure API Management, including the token and decision.
- APIM receives the accept or decline decision and applies the same security policies as the initial click.
- Policies can enforce throttling, input validation and protection against replay or tampering.
- Only valid, policy compliant decisions are forwarded into the back end flows.
- A second Power Automate instant flow receives the decision from APIM.
- The flow validates the token again, maps it back to the correct SharePoint application record and offer.
- It returns a simple final page that thanks the applicant for accepting, or confirms that they have chosen to decline.
- Write the applicant decision back into the SharePoint scholarship application record.
- Store the response type, timestamp and any tracking metadata needed for reporting.
- Optionally raise internal notifications so teams and dashboards update in near real time.
This workflow handles how applicants securely accept or decline a scholarship once an offer has been issued. All responses are routed through Azure API Management, ensuring that back end flows are never exposed and that every request is validated, throttled and protected against tampering. Power Automate instant flows return lightweight branded pages to the applicant and write the final decision back to SharePoint with a full audit trail, giving teams confidence that responses are captured accurately, securely and in real time.