Scholarships help cover a range of educational expenses, such as tuition, books, and fees. Whether based on financial need or academic achievement, each scholarship comes with its own set of requirements. While many are geared toward students just starting college or university, there are also plenty of options for current undergraduate and graduate students.
Challenges
- Many scholarships ask for a variety of documents, like reference letters, transcripts, and writing samples.
- If a scholarship is need-based, the financial aid office might need to complete a separate verification step.
- Submission packets can get pretty lengthy, which can make things a bit challenging for reviewers to work through.
- The review process can involve multiple steps, so administrators need efficient ways to identify top applicants.
Solutions
- The application form (Requirements page) will restrict applicants to submitting materials in the same order.
- Reviewers can easily export PDF packets of each application, complete with a clear, paginated table of contents.
- Build different routing steps for each stage of verification and feedback. You can easily loop in financial aid representatives whenever their expertise is needed.
- Download specific reports to easily see which applicants rose to the top through each routing step.
Tips
- Make it easy for reviewers by placing key details—like contact information, academic standing, and a short personal statement—right at the top of the application form.
- To help reviewers make decisions faster, have applicants upload the most important file attachments first so they appear earlier in the packet.
- Need reviewers to rank applications? There are three different approaches, described in detail here: How to Rank Applications Using Routing Steps.
- If Comments & Rating Combination routing steps are used, download the Rankings by Score report for the quickest snapshot. Dig in further with the Total Application Scores by Reviewer report, which displays averages and standard deviations.
- Use Progress Reports to collect thank you notes to share with donors or other stakeholders.
