fbpx

How We Built a Social Entrepreneurship Platform for Over 50,000 Students Worldwide

Hult Prize at

CUSTOM CRM WEB APPLICATION

The Client

The Hult Prize is the  world’s largest international organization for launching social impact startups. The vision of the Foundation is to challenge young entrepreneurs on college and university campuses to solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges – like poverty, food security, energy, and education. This movement has deployed more than $50M of capital into the sector and has mobilized and empowered millions of young people to re-think the future of business. Referred to as the “Nobel Prize for Students,” the Hult Prize has brought brilliant minds across more than 100 countries together in the name of innovation and impact.  

The Challenge

One of many projects that Fifth Tribe worked on with the Hult Prize was to help expand their annual student competition to individual schools around the world.  The motivation was to find a way for universities to participate in the Hult Prize movement in order to encourage global social entrepreneurship; the idea was to give each school the means to host their own competitions with the winning teams automatically bypassing the traditional application process (and 100,000 other applicants) to reach one of the fifteen regional final rounds and a coveted spot in the startup accelerator to have the chance to win $1 million.  Fifth Tribe worked with the Hult Prize to develop a portal that would allow universities to organize their own local Hult Prize competitions.

The Solution

Hult Prize at brings the renowned international competition directly to college campuses, not only inviting more students to join a community of global changemakers and encouraging them to become social entrepreneurs, but also expanding the ways by which the Hult Prize strives to tackle the world’s most pressing issues.  That the program fosters socially-conscious ideas also means that more socially-conscious startups are being provided with the support they need to make radical impacts. Fifth Tribe ran with this innovative proposal in order to create a custom CRM platform on which Hult Prize at could be launched and accessed by college campuses all over the world.  We built a software that automated the workflow of the registration, design, and pitch process for students while giving campus directors and Hult Prize administrators more convenient and accessible means of organizing and monitoring the competition. The engine gives teams a structured and organized template to design their own project pages, which they fill out after completing the online application and registration.  They then move on to the pitch stage and winners fast-track to the regional finals; in fact, in the past three years, five out of six global finalists got their start in the Hult at Initiative and both the 2014 and 2016 Global Champions heralded from Hult Prize at campuses. Fifth Tribe made Hult Prize at a reality, giving universities the chance to host their own Hult Prize competitions and ultimately bringing more student ideas to life. Check out Hult Prize at here! Hult Prize Campus Directors Application for 2019-2020 can be found here.

The Results

Hult Prize at is an international program run by the Hult Prize Foundation, with an online platform – accessible by students and universities across the world – that was designed and developed by Fifth Tribe.  The portal makes it possible for student leaders to organize and host their own, localized version of the Hult Prize through the provided online “tool kit,” and also increases the opportunity for young socially-conscious creators and innovators to get involved in a global competition that tackles some of the world’s most critical issues.  As of recently, over 540 campuses have implemented the web application, meaning that over 50,000 people are active on the platform.