Child's Play Grant Portal

Child's Play, the gaming nonprofit founded by the creators of Penny Arcade, funds therapeutic games and technology for pediatric hospitals through three cycles a year: an Annual Gift tied to bed count, an Equipment Grant, and a Capacity Grant for dedicated gaming technology positions and projects. The program ran across a legacy grant platform, an Airtable base behind an older portal, spreadsheets and email. There was no single view of a hospital's history, eligibility and compliance were tracked by hand, and a team of six was carrying almost 200 hospitals on it.

Base Flows moved the entire data layer from Airtable to Softr Databases in three weeks, freezing the base, importing it as a mirror, redesigning the schema and validating every record before cutover. On top of it, hospitals and foundations got their own portal: they see their eligibility and reporting status, apply to open cycles with their hospital data already filled in, and follow every application, award and disbursement. Foundation contacts see the hospitals they support, and hospital contacts see only their own.

The standout is the review pipeline. Applications land in a review queue, each reviewer scores them in a panel built around the equipment actually requested, and a ranking view runs the cycle budget against a minimum score with tiebreakers, showing in real time which applications are funded, which fall short and where the gap is. The Equipment Grant review went from three weeks to one, and the final decision now takes an hour instead of a full day.

From there, awards turn into money without leaving the portal. DocuSign grant agreements are tracked by envelope stage, a disbursement prep view splits each award into cash and in-kind and creates disbursements in batch, and a communication tool built with Vibe Coding targets campaigns by role, hospital, foundation and state with templates, scheduled sends and a full history. An impact dashboard answers the donor question of where the money went across roughly 1,000 line items by company, category, hospital and state.

Child's Play served 193 hospitals in 2026, up from 162, with the same team of six, and ongoing software costs dropped by roughly half after moving to one platform. The team now writes its own Vibe Coding blocks and DocuSign workflows on top of the portal, so the build became ongoing co-development instead of a handoff. In the words of Garrett Goody, Pediatric Gaming Technology Manager: "Time saved by our new system is enormous with consistency and zero manual error."