Are you running an accelerator or mentor program for companies that require applications? Or are you managing a dealflow? With the applications community set up, you'll have greater control over companies applying, and you can ask custom questions before entry.

Applications is an alternative community set-up in CrowdWorks that you can have alongside your main community to expand your network and manage applicants and dealflow.

In this article

The CrowdWorks team will help you with implementing your processes. This is a simple overview of the setup process.

There are 2 types of questions you can include in the application for founders to fill out: default and custom questions. Together, these create a complete application and simultaneously, the founder has filled out their company profile in CrowdWorks.

It is best to utilise as many of the default questions as possible; this will help the founder get started. You can complement with custom questions in areas where the company profile does not cover all of your evaluation criteria.

The order of questions is fully customisable as well as the number of them. The CrowdWorks team will create the application form for you.

You can pick and choose which of the default questions to include in the application and in which order the founder will answer them.

The default questions include:

Basics

Company details

Company information

Extra uploads

In addition to the default questions that also populate the company profile, you can add custom questions. There are 5 different types of custom questions in the application form. You can include the question text as well as subtext for the question in each format.

The text type allows the applicant to answer in free text to your question.

With the yes-no question type, you get yes and no options for the question.

A question that has labels as the multiple choice selection, and the answers populate the labels in the community.

A question that has groups as the multiple choice selection, and the labels populate the groups in the community.

Custom option, where you can add custom options for the answers. Can be either multiple choice or only choose one.

You can preview what your application form looks like to the founders by clicking the preview application button on the top right section of the screen.

This is how the start of an application could look:

The companies travel through different statuses when they progress in their application. Community admins can easily move the companies from one status to another when needed. At first, all companies are pending.

You can see all companies in the "All" tab at all times. In the different tabs (All, Pending, Under review and Hidden), companies are organised into a table. You can customise each of the tables to include the columns that are relevant to your progress.

You can edit the company list and choose which columns are visible across all company tables. Each of the tabs, statuses and groups can have its own column setup.

Customise the columns in the company table to best support your workflow. Community admins can add and remove columns that are relevant for each stage, and the setup will be shown for everyone.

When companies start their application, they become visible in the pending tab. You are able to see when they have started the application, follow their progress and see whether they have submitted their application. Once the companies have submitted the application, they can be moved to "under review".

You can see when the company started their application in the "started" column, and when the company has submitted their application, there will be a date in the "submitted" column.

Companies can edit their application even after submission until the edit deadline date has been reached. That date can be different from the submission deadline date.

To see what the companies have shared in their application, click on the company name. This opens a pop-up window where you can navigate between the application and profile tabs.

In the pop-up, you can also add labels to the company, contact the founder and share the company profile with your colleagues.

To move companies to "under review" status, you simply choose the "under review" status from the drop-down menu. When the company has been moved to the under review tab, you can move them in the different group status.

The founder is not informed that they have been moved to under review.

When companies are set to "under review", they can be further sorted into groups and, in addition to that, rated in each of the groups. If you wish to see all companies that are under review, you can find them at the "all under review" tab. If you only have one group, then the "all under review" is your only tab.

You have 2 options for presenting the companies that are under review: List view or Board view. In the all companies and pending tab, you can only see companies in the list view.

You can view the groups either as a list view or as a board view. You can seamlessly switch between them from the top of the screen by clicking on the view you wish to have active.

In the list view, companies are listed in a table. You can customise which columns are visible there as well as their order, and use the columns to sort and filter the company list. It is automatically sorted by the name of the company.

Tip: You can search by company name when you click the Name title in the Name column.

The list view supports bulk actions such as moving the selected companies to a group or labelling them. You can also move the selected companies to a different community from here. It also lets you export all company application data.

The board view gives a quick overview of all the companies and their status, and you can drag and drop the companies from one status to another based on their journey. In the board view, the status of the companies is the main focus.

When you click on the company card, you get the full company profile pop-up.

When you add and create groups, you can organise applicants and deal flow in preferred categories. Groups can be related to industries, stages, dealflow, category administrators or whatever is meaningful to your processes.

As shown in the image above, in this setup, there are 2 groups: "Applications AI" and "Applications Clean Energy".

Company applications can be part of one or many groups, and each group supports review comments and scoring, to keep track of them individually. Within the groups, you can define statuses, and the companies can be dragged to a new status based on their progress.

You can create a new group either from the settings or from the under review tab. In the under review tab, you can see the three dots on the right side of the page. Click there to create a new group or

You can edit the order of the groups by dragging them by the dots into the preferred order. To delete a group, click the trashcan. To rename the group, simply write a new name in the text field.

Statuses apply to all groups, and all changes will be reflected in all groups. So each status you add will be visible in all of your groups. You can control your statuses easily in the settings.

You can use the statuses to follow your internal workflows or processes, or as a light task management system for your follow-ups on the applicants or deal flow. If a status is deleted, the company applications will get the default status.

You can add a new status to your groups in the settings or by clicking the "new status" box in the board view. You can add a custom name and choose the colour for the status.

In this example setup, the group has 4 different statuses:

You can add these custom statuses to suit your workflow. You can have as many statuses as you need and give them custom names.

To rearrange the statuses, drag them in the list by the three dots. To delete the status, click the trashcan icon on the right.

Changing the status of the company happens a bit differently based on which view you are currently using. The board view is optimised to change the statuses of the companies effortlessly.

In the list view, you are able to see the status of the company in the status column. You can filter the table based on the company status.

To change the status of the company in the list view

The board view is an interactive visual presentation of the companies in their application process. You can drag and drop the companies into their new status in this presentation. In the board view, you can get a quick visual overview of the companies in your pipeline.

You can add custom labels to your companies to make it easier to filter and highlight companies in the company list. You can also use the application questions to assign labels to your companies automatically.

You can automatically assign labels to companies based on their responses in their applications. This makes your administrative process faster and simpler.

There is a specific question type where the multiple choice options are different labels you have predetermined. When the founder fills out their application and answers the question by choosing one option, it will automatically label the company for you.

The CrowdWorks team will help you with setting up the application questions.

You can create custom lables form the company list view. You can also manage and create labels from the company card.

Each of these concepts has a different function, but they all relate to each other.

Groups and statuses are structure whereas labels are information.

Groups

A way to organise companies into your process of evaluating them. You group companies based on their characteristics or phase in your evaluation process. In a group, you have statuses.

Status

You have statuses inside your groups, and all the groups share the same statuses. They are a way to organise the companies within the group based on their status in the process.

Labels

Labels give extra information about the company and make it filterable based on that characteristic. Labels follow the company to every group and status.

When you need to hide companies from your application process, you can change their status to hidden. When hidden, they are removed from the under review tab and added to the hidden tab. Founders are not informed about the status change.

All application data is saved, and you can at any point change their status back to under review.

You can rate companies that are under review in the application community. This can help you determine which of the applicants gets approved. The rating system is flexible, and there are multiple rating formats you can choose from. The CrowdWorks team will set it up for you based on your process.

Each member of the community (admins and advisors) can rate companies. This helps you to collaborate with your team and gives you flexibility in evaluating your applications.

Companies need to be in "Under Review" to be open for rating. Furthermore, if you have set up a group structure, companies need to be assigned to at least one of the groups to be open for rating. If you do not have groups in your setup, then you can perform rating in the default "Under Review" tab.

Companies can get a separate rating in each group they belong to:

You can give your rating in the company application pop-up:

In the review box, you can see the status of the company as well as to which group it belongs. You can see how others have rated it and if they have any comments:

You can also add comments to the company alongside their rating. This is done similarly to giving the score. Other members in the community can read the comments.

If there are already comments, you can open the comments to add your comment and read what others have commented.

When the ratings are automatically aggregated, everyone can give their own rating, and the total score is shown in the company table in its own column. When hovering over the total score, you can see individual ratings from the members and quickly access the company application.

There are three options for the rating, and you can choose the one that fits your processes the best. The options are:

Rate the company with, for example, 1-5 stars. You can choose the number of stars.

Rate the company with a score, for example, 1-5 or 1-10. You can choose the amount of buttons.

Add a single number to rate the company. You can choose the max and minimum value. Decimal numbers are also allowed.

You can have a separate rating in each of the groups for the same company:

This can be useful when you, for example, have multiple rounds that the companies go through before they are selected. Then you can easily see the "Round 1" score and "Round 2" score alongside each other.

You can always see all the group scores on the company application pop-up.

You can export all application data to Excel with one click. This will generate a CSV file for you with all the application data, which you can then further edit in Excel.

Note: You can find the Export button only in the list view.

Do you want to manage your dealflow with CrowdWorks? Contact us here!