The TED Fellows program provides transformational support to a global community of over 500 people who are collaborating across disciplines to spark change around the world. The TED Fellows team uses Stacker to manage and review the thousands of applications they receive for the programme.

‘When I joined the team in 2020,’ explains Leonie Hoerster, Senior Program Manager for TED Fellows, ‘the team were using a custom-built platform that wasn’t set-up for processing applications, combined with I don’t know how many Google Docs’

"'Stacker became our one-stop-shop throughout the applicant review process.

Thanks to Stacker, the TED Fellows team each gets 8 hours – or roughly one working day – back per week."

Leonie Hoerster

Senior Program Manager for TED Fellows

So the team moved their data to Airtable but still needed a clean, clear and secure way for their team of reviewers to look through applications and make decisions on each candidate. Enter Stacker. 

‘I think what I really appreciated about Stacker was how nimble it was. We’d have meetings about the look of the platform and we were able to just move things around, add features if we needed to and create something that was really easy for our reviewers to use.’ 

Once the app was set up, Stacker became the home base for the team’s applicant process.

‘Everything got funneled into Stacker,’ explains Leonie. ‘It became our one-stop-shop throughout the process – if there were additional forms or surveys that all the applicants needed to receive, we could do all that within Stacker.’

Thanks to Stacker, the TED Fellows team each gets 8 hours – or roughly one working day – back per week. 

‘Stacker upped our game not just in terms of internal organisation but also in how we share applicant information with our team of external reviewers. The feedback from our reviewers has been overwhelmingly positive.’