How a Harvard Non-Profit Cut Admin by 60%

Case Study Highlights

• Client: Harvard Business School Club of New York (a prestigious non-profit).
• Challenge: Manual processes were slowing down their pro-bono volunteers and limiting their impact.
• Key Result: Cut administrative overhead by 60% and onboarded expert volunteers 50% faster.

Harvard alumni want to help small businesses. Pro bono.

But HBSCNY's process for their Small Business Initiative was manual. Slow. Full of friction. Good intentions were getting stuck in bad workflow.

The Operational Hurdle

Their mission is to connect world-class talent with businesses that need it most. Their internal process wasn't living up to that standard.

• Onboarding took too long. Valuable volunteer time was wasted before a project even began.
• Project tracking was a mess of emails and spreadsheets. No one had a clear view of progress.
• Admin staff were buried in repetitive, manual tasks instead of focusing on program growth.

"Our mission is to leverage world-class talent to help small businesses. Our internal process simply wasn't built to scale that mission effectively."

— Bill, Lead, HBSCNY

Crafting the Solution

The goal wasn't to add more software. It was to create a single, seamless experience for everyone involved.

• One central hub. We moved all volunteer, client, and project data into Airtable. Everything now lives in one place.
• A dedicated portal. Using Softr, we built a simple, user-friendly portal for volunteers and clients to see everything they needed. No more digging through emails.
• An automation engine. We used Make to handle the repetitive work: onboarding sequences, project assignments, and feedback requests. All automatic.

Measurable Impact

The transformation freed the team to focus on what actually mattered: delivering high-quality consulting.

• 60% less administrative overhead. The team was unburied, allowing them to focus on core program goals and expansion.
• 50% faster volunteer onboarding. Experts were matched with projects and began making an impact in half the time.
• 50% faster consult turnaround. With a streamlined workflow, projects moved more efficiently from start to finish, delivering value to small businesses sooner.
• Built for Scale. The new system was so effective, it has now been implemented across other HBSCNY programs to maximize their impact.

"The transformation was immediate. Our team can now focus on the mission, not the minutiae. We're scaling our impact in ways that simply weren't possible before."

— Mansoor, Volunteer, HBSCNY

Key Takeaway for Your Business

For non-profits, operational efficiency isn't just about saving money. It's about redirecting every possible resource back to the mission.

Think your process is broken?

Let's talk.