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“After making changes to the application and our communication process, the foundation saw applicant questions drop eighty percent.”
James T. and Rose M. Perryman Family Foundation
A Family Mission, Run by Volunteers
James T. and Rose M. Perryman Family Foundation started as a family vision: to turn the success of a family business into opportunities for students. Ten years later, it is still entirely family-run and entirely volunteer-powered. Diane Damon leads the foundation today, a role she stepped into early and has grown into over the years, now balancing both day-to-day direction and a seat on the board. That reality shapes everything about how the foundation operates, starting with the tools it depends on.
The Challenge: Too Much Time Managing the Process
Before akoyaGO, the James T. and Rose M. Perryman Family Foundation ran on two separate platforms, one to track current scholars and graduates, another just for applications, plus spreadsheets to fill the gaps in between. Payment records lived in their own file entirely. Nothing talked to each other.
With no dedicated staff and a fully volunteer board, every hour spent moving data between systems was an hour not spent on students. As the scholarship program grew, the administration process became increasingly difficult to manage. Diane and the foundation needed a way to bring the pieces together without adding staff.
Building One Record for Every Student
Since moving to akoyaGO, Diane has built out scholar records that go well beyond standard contact information. Alongside name, school, and mailing address, there’s mentor assignments, check-in history, areas where students may need additional support, and full application history, all in one record.
“We don’t have administrative staff that I can say, go do this thing or go find this information. Using akoyaGO, I can pull up a record and see the student’s entire profile, including their application, check-ins, and everything else that goes into that relationship. Saving as much time as possible with quick access and instant visibility was one of the main reasons we decided to look for software.”
That single view replaced what used to be a patchwork of tools. Instead of exporting data to Excel and building pivot tables, Diane filters directly inside akoyaGO. Checking in on a single mentor’s full caseload, for example, now takes seconds instead of a separate export and spreadsheet.
“If I want to look at all the students one of our mentors is supporting, I can set a filter in about three seconds and see who’s been checked in with. That saves me a lot of time.”
Redesigning Applications Without Outside Help
This past year, the James T. and Rose M. Perryman Family Foundation rebuilt both of its scholarship applications, one for its college track and one for its trade school track, working with a marketing team to make the applications more accessible. Diane used akoyaGO’s application builder to add conditional logic on her own, including a new county-based eligibility flow that adjusts based on the state an applicant selects. The redesigned applications also helped streamline the experience for applicants. After making changes to the application and communication process, the foundation saw applicant questions drop eighty percent.
“I was able to make it exactly how I wanted, even adding logic statements. I implemented that without any help.”
A Volunteer Network Without Boundaries
Because the James T. and Rose M. Perryman Family Foundation has no central office, its volunteers are spread across the country. akoyaGO gives every mentor and board member, wherever they live, one place to log in, complete reviews, and manage check-ins on their own schedule.
“Having one unified system eliminates multiple log ins. Now I can say log in here to do everything from your reviews to your check-ins, which helps keep us centralized. This makes it easier for our volunteers who have 30 minutes while their kids are in swim lessons to pull out their laptop, and do their reviews.”
A Partnership That Keeps Building
For Diane, the software is only part of the value. She points to the akoyaGO team’s responsiveness and openness to feedback as a defining part of the relationship, including a working session with akoyaGO’s product and technical team where she shared what a scholarship-focused foundation actually needs from the platform. For a volunteer-run organization without dedicated IT or administrative staff, having a team that listens, responds, and helps find solutions has become an important part of the partnership.
The Impact: Ten Years, and Counting
The James T. and Rose M. Perryman Family Foundation is marking its 10th year, currently supporting 49 students across its college and trade school scholarship tracks. Students come from western Pennsylvania, Ohio, a slice of New York, most of West Virginia, and part of Maryland, many from rural communities with limited access to higher education funding. Over those ten years, the foundation has grown while remaining completely volunteer-run. Today, it supports students across its college and trade-school programs while continuing to provide individualized support through mentors and regular student check-ins.
The results reach beyond spreadsheets and dashboards. Diane has watched students graduate debt free and go on to pursue degrees they might not have otherwise been able to afford.
“The ability to graduate debt free is amazing, but we’ve also seen a large number of students go on to get their master’s, their PhD. That really changes what they’re able to do.”
Why akoyaGO
When asked what she’d tell another scholarship foundation considering akoyaGO, Diane didn’t hesitate.
“The number one answer for me would be the people and the support. If you want to learn something, there’s someone who’s going to help you. And the technology is there. It can do almost anything you want.”
Ameliea Dulaney brings more than seven years of marketing experience rooted entirely in the philanthropic sector. Her career began at a small nonprofit in her hometown, where a lifelong passion for mission-driven work and a natural gift for storytelling found their professional home. Over the years she built her expertise across multiple nonprofit organizations before transitioning into the foundation world, where she led marketing for a community foundation. That experience gave her a deep, firsthand understanding of how foundations operate, what they need, and how to communicate their impact. She joined akoyaGO to bring that perspective to the technology side of philanthropy, helping foundations do good better.
