Ella Rises

Ella Rises is a nonprofit focused on empowering young women through events and mentorship. For our university INTEX capstone project, our team built a web platform around the real-world challenge Ella Rises presented — giving administrators a way to track participant survey data, measure event impact, and make decisions about future programming.

The organization was running on spreadsheets and manual workflows. The capstone problem called for a database-backed platform that could handle participant data securely, surface meaningful dashboard metrics, and remain easy enough for non-technical administrators to maintain over time. Budget constraints were a real factor, so the deployment architecture had to be cost-efficient.

I designed a SQL database hosted on AWS RDS and deployed the web application via Elastic Beanstalk for cost-effective scaling. The platform separates a clean public site from a secure admin portal, with dashboard metrics pulled directly from participant surveys. We shaped the admin experience around the actual workflows Ella Rises described during the project.

The capstone delivered a fully functional platform with an admin portal and dashboard tooling built around the participant tracking needs Ella Rises presented. The project demonstrated how a lean AWS deployment could support a nonprofit's data and reporting needs without requiring a large infrastructure budget.