Situation

Project OneTen’s freshman success program is built around a clear outcome: helping students gain leadership and essential skills to ensure they complete freshman year “on track” with a 3.0+ GPA. Their programming combines mentorship, academic support, skills-building workshops, and community-building so students have both academic structure and a strong community around them.

Before the build, program operations lived across Google Drive, spreadsheets, and email. Notes, attendance, event registrations, and student status signals were tracked manually, with no syncing and no streamlined way to see the full picture. The team described needing to reference multiple spreadsheets just to answer an important question: How are students doing in the program and what is the program’s impact during freshman year?

That challenge was amplified by two realities:

• They are not directly connected into any single school system, so academic data had to be collected and tracked intentionally and manually.
• Their outreach is complex: students, mentors, and parents; English and Spanish; different messages depending on RSVP status and event timing.

Priorities:

• Faster turnaround
• Fewer errors and less rework
• Better reporting
• Better visibility for the people running the program

Solution

ProsperSpark built an Airtable-based program operations system designed for day-to-day execution and stakeholder reporting.

Core components:

1. Centralized student and adult volunteer profiles so staff can see key details in one place, instead of scattered spreadsheets.

2. Linked records so contact updates happen once and flow everywhere, reducing duplicates and outdated info.

3. Interfaces for staff workflows, so the team doesn’t have to operate out of grids.

4. A color-coded “flags” system to quickly assess student and adult volunteer statuses across program signals:

• • Workshop participation flag (attendance-based)
  • Mentor engagement flag, based on mentor touchpoints logged via form
  • Academic flag (quarterly GPA captured via form and calculated against the 3.0+ goal)
  • Weekly Tutoring flag (participation tracking)

5. Airtable Automations for recurring outreach, built to handle the real complexity:

• • Audience targeting (student vs mentor vs parent)
  • RSVP state (RSVP’d vs not RSVP’d)
  • Language preference (English vs Spanish)
  • Confirmations, reminders, and follow-ups

Results

Project OneTen moved from spreadsheet-and-email coordination to a centralized Airtable system with real-time updates and consistent workflows.

Measured improvement

• A key workflow step dropped from 30 minutes to 5 minutes. That's 25 minutes saved each time, 83% less time, and 6x faster for that step.

Program Capacity

• 100% program growth supported in one year: 20 students in 2024 to 40 students in 2025
• Team size remained 3 internal full-time staff
• Current involvement: 85 students, mentors, and staff
• Programming cadence: 2 events/month 

Operational impact

• More consistent outreach, including scheduled, personalized email sequences to 80+ people

• Cleaner data and fewer inconsistencies because updates happen once and flow through linked records
• Better visibility through dashboards used internally and shared externally (mentors, parents, funders)
• More capacity for "groundwork" that systems can't do: calls, check-ins, tailored support

Estimated Savings

• 40-45 hours saved per month on email outreach (estimate; based on recurring outreach scenarios that previously took ~30 minutes each, now ~5 minutes, with segmentation by role, language, and RSVP state)

• Estimated roughly 540 hours saved annually 

Exception handling the team didn’t have before

• Attendance and “missing information” checks are visible in Interfaces, so gaps get caught early.

• Automated reminders and check-ins support consistent follow-through (including multi-email sequences tied to workshops).

• Alerts can route issues to the right person when a coach indicates they need support.

Inferred

• Less back-and-forth to confirm what’s current.

• Fewer “version” problems and fewer manual clean-up cycles.

• Faster follow-up when something is missing or a student/coach needs support.