Transforming the application process for a life-changing award

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Creative Capital has offered substantial financial and professional support for groundbreaking artists for almost twenty years. In 2018, their applications open up to a wider pool of creative fields and awards will be made more frequently. They approached Familiar for help with modernizing their application system and for help making their offering clearer and their process more transparent.

Apply microsite

The Apply microsite is an opportunity for Creative Capital to clearly communicate the value of their awards, the range of artists they give the award to, and what it’s like to apply, collecting information that’s otherwise located in different sections of their main website.

Because the microsite will co-exist with the main Creative Capital site, we focused on enhancing their visual branding, doubling down on their expansive color palette and thoughtfully extending their limited typographic expression.

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The Application

We designed the application from the ground up to be focused on improving the process of applying, making it easy to progress through a rigorous application form with multiple in depth questions examining each applicants goals, practice, and relationship to the larger art world. By enabling each applicant to see the whole form at once, but encouraging them to answer each question one by one and allowing them to save their responses and come back later, we made what could be a daunting task more straightforward. We also made the whole thing responsive, so applicants can make progess on their application no matter what device they’re using.

Every applicant now has an account with personal information stored in Craft, to make it easier to keep applicants up to date and allow them to review their past applications in the future.

All information associated with the application itself is stored in a custom-configured Salesforce database, allowing Creative Capital to access applicant data anywhere, to run reports on their applications, and helping to streamline the evaluation process.

Evaluation

Thousands of artists apply for consideration by Creative Capital, and in 2018, more artists will be eligible for consideration than ever before. Familiar carefully designed and implemented a front end optimized around reading, rating and ranking all of these applications. Using Salesforce as our application database makes it easy to store additional data on each application from any number of participants in the process, and radically streamlines the process of assigning evaluators and narrowing the field down to the final recipients.