Case Study: Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale speeds grant approvals with Airtable

Yale's Tsai Center approves grant funding four times faster

Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale (Tsai CITY) needed a better way to manage student venture and grant applications. Before using Airtable, staff handled submissions manually through Google Forms, emails, and spreadsheets, which took more than a week of work for each cycle and created delays in reviewing and responding to students.

With Airtable, Tsai CITY built an end-to-end application and funding workflow using Airtable forms, linked records, automated emails, dashboards, and base sync. The result was a 4x faster approval process, funding decisions made in 30 minutes instead of two hours, 10 minutes to send 70 emails instead of at least two hours, and an extra week of programming time each semester. Airtable also helped increase fall events by 23% and improve reviewer matching, feedback, and visibility into funding decisions.

Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale

Matt Gira

Director of Student Programming