GCC’s old internal site for managing scholarship thank you letters presented several challenges. Students had to manually download a template, write their letter, and upload it to the portal. Personalizing letters for individual donors, especially when multiple donors were involved, added to the complexity. Technical issues with photo sizing often disrupted the layout, and a strict document naming convention was required for staff review.

But that is not where the scholarship thank you letter process ended. Staff were also asked to monitor the process, urging students to complete their letters and tracking what was incomplete, but also to review each individual letter to ensure proper grammar and completion of a well-written thank you letter. These manual processes were time-consuming, prone to errors, and resulted in delays, impacting the timely acknowledgment of donor contributions.

When discrepancies arose, such as a mismatch in the final letter count within the portal, the staff would contact their IT team to retrieve any missing files from the back end. Once letters were submitted into the portal, the team would export the student thank you letters to print. However, when the Word documents were exported from the portal into a PDF document, it would cause a second wave of editing, as the export required reorganizing photos, updating the size and position of signatures, and adjusting spacing to ensure each letter was only one page. At times, some letters would get stuck in the portal and provide a pop-up error, requiring the letters to be exported individually from the portal. This cumbersome process was vital for expressing gratitude and sustaining donor relations