Doxa Scholarships

The Overview.

Doxa Scholarships is a nonprofit organization connecting high-achieving students from underserved communities in Ghana with fully funded scholarship opportunities at leading universities worldwide. The organization runs two parallel operations: a scholarship application and selection process for students, and a donor engagement programme for individuals and corporations who fund the awards. Drille Digital was engaged to design and build a platform that could serve both sides of this equation efficiently, reducing the administrative burden on the Doxa team while improving the experience for both students and donors.

The Challenge.

The existing application process was managed largely through email and spreadsheets, creating enormous manual overhead and a poor experience for applicants. Students applying for scholarships, often from low-resource environments with limited digital experience, were expected to navigate complex email chains and upload documents to unfamiliar platforms. On the donor side, there was no digital giving infrastructure at all, meaning the organisation was leaving money on the table from people who wanted to give but couldn't find a way to do it simply. Both problems needed solving simultaneously on a nonprofit budget.

The Solution.

We designed the platform in two distinct layers: a student-facing application portal optimised for low-bandwidth environments and mobile-first interaction, and a donor-facing giving experience focused on clarity, trust signals, and frictionless payment. The application flow was designed with particular care, mapping the actual journey students went through, identifying where drop-off was most likely, and rebuilding the flow around those pain points. For donors, we built a transparent impact dashboard showing exactly where contributions went, which significantly improved donor retention in pilot testing. The whole platform was built on a stack that the small Doxa team could manage without ongoing technical support.

The Results.

Application completion rates improved significantly after launch, with a notable reduction in applications abandoned mid-way. The donor platform went live with ten founding donors and grew organically from there. The Doxa team reported that the administrative time spent on application processing dropped by more than half.