Once all of your scholarship applications have been reviewed, it’s time to make award decisions - and AwardSpring makes it so simple to find the perfect candidate. Here’s how to make the most of the options and information available in the Award & Deny tab of your AwardSpring application, so you and your donors can be certain you’ve made the very best award decisions!

The Applicant Table

Each applicant to a given scholarship appears in an applicant table located in the Award/Deny tab. By default, you’ll see columns that list each applicant’s average reviewer score and the amount of money already awarded. Hover over the average reviewer score to see a breakdown of each individual reviewer score. You can add new column to reveal information that will be important to your award decision. Answers to any questions asked on your application can be added here, and you can add as many new columns as you’d like.

Filtering Applicants

Once you have customized all of the information you need, you can add parameters around that information to narrow down your list of applicants. For example, you may wish to only award students with a specific major, a GPA over 3.5, or those who have indicated that they have a financial need. (This is a great time to filter based on your donors’ preferences!) Use the “Add Filter” button to add as many filtering criteria as you’d like; once your filters are applied, any candidates who do not meet the requirements will be removed from the list.

Selecting Your Candidates

With filters in place, your applicant table is now full of the very best candidates for your scholarship. Clicking the arrows in each column header will sort the table by that header; this can help you see, for example, the least-awarded students or best-reviewed students rise to the top of the list. Once you’ve chosen the best candidate, click “Award” in the Action column for every student you wish to award. You can then click the arrow to the left of the Action header to deny all non-awarded students, or you can go down the list and manually choose “Deny” for each non-awarded student.

If you ever have questions about how to use the Award & Deny features, or if you’d like a refresher training course, just send us a note at support@awardspring.com and we’ll be glad to help!

Only about 40% of AwardSpring customers take advantage of one of our most powerful features: the Student Integration Engine. So, what does it do? And how does it benefit institutions and scholarship administrators?

#1: It maintains accurate student data.

By pulling student data from your backend system, you no longer have to rely on students to provide accurate data during the application process.

#2: It keeps data in sync across multiple platforms.

With our Student Integration Engine, you can pull information like a student’s major, class schedule, or GPA directly into AwardSpring. Use that data to maintain a student’s scholarship eligibility and you’ll eliminate a few administrative tasks for yourself!

#3: It makes the application process even easier.

Populating your application with student data points from your SIS can dramatically reduce the time it takes a student to finish applying. In fact, if you can import a large volume of data points, you may be able to eliminate the application process altogether! Just let AwardSpring become your decision engine and match students to awards. Simple scholarships with no additional requirements will not necessitate any further action on the students’ part; if there are additional requirements, students can simply respond to those questions and essay prompts without re-entering any of the data that was pulled from the SIS.

Our Student Integration Engine can be added at any time for a one-time integration fee and a small annual maintenance fee. If you’re interested in learning more about our Student Integration Engine or would like to add it, simply contact us at support@awardspring.com.

Have you fully explored AwardSpring’s reporting capabilities? If not, you should know that the information available within our standard and custom reports can reveal important statistics about your application, awarding decisions, review process, and applicants - all of which you can use to track trends over time or improve the management your scholarship program. Follow our guide to discover which reports to run (or ask for) to help you track and achieve your most important goals.

Improving Your Application

We recommend revisiting and optimizing your application after every award cycle, and our Student Answers report will help you understand what exactly should be updated. This report will show you which sections of your application were left incomplete by each applicant. Notice a particular section that was abandoned often? You might need to edit the question, change the format, or even eliminate it altogether to boost application completeness in the next award cycle.

The Qualified Students Report is another standard report you can use to glean information that will improve your application. This report shows you all of the students who were qualified for, but not applied to, a given scholarship. Run this report to look for trends - you may need to re-enable auto-apply or reduce your qualification requirements if you have a large number of qualified-but-unapplied students for a particular scholarship.

Refining Your Review Process

First, ensure that your application includes questions that are relevant to your goals and targets, so that the relevant responses are picked up in reports. For example, if gender parity is a focus of your donors or organization, be sure to ask a question about gender on your application! (And remember, any question you ask can always be blinded from reviewers later - so you don’t need to avoid asking questions that could potentially introduce bias to the review process.)

Ask us for a custom report that overlays your reviewer scores with demographic data to assess whether your review process is fair and unbiased. If you notice preferential scoring for specific demographics, this can be the justification you need for blinding more of your data or even changing up your review staff.

Analyzing Your Awards

Custom reports that include demographics about your awarded students can reveal progress toward meeting specific targets, such as awarding more women for STEM scholarships, awarding more low-income students, or achieving gender parity in scholarship awards. Let us know which demographics are important to you, and we can create a report that suits your needs.

Tracking Trends

Report data can help you tell a story about the success of your scholarship management program over time, too. We can create a custom report for you that examines any number of statistics for a given award cycle, including completed, started, or submitted applications; number of awarded students; total dollar amount awarded; awarded student demographics; and many others. The longer you use AwardSpring - and the longer you keep the relevant application questions unchanged - the more complete your picture of progress will become.

For help accessing reports, or to request a custom report, get in touch at support@awardspring.com.