Switching from a paper process to an online process can reveal a challenge that you may not have dealt with before: incomplete applications. With an online process like AwardSpring, you can see who has started, but not yet submitted, a scholarship application. That gives you an opportunity to help those students submit before your deadline, ensuring that you have plenty of qualified applicants to choose from during the review process.

There are a few reasons why students don’t finish their applications, including:

- Students have technical difficulties that prevent them from completing their applications.

- After beginning an application, they take a break to work on essays or other sections that require more thought and effort.

- Students decide they aren’t good candidates for the scholarship(s) and abandon their applications.

- With most sections completed, students wait for required documents from a third party before submitting.

- Students step away from their applications and simply forget to return.

You can alleviate the problems faced by most of the students described above by planning to take some concrete steps before, during, and at the very end of your application window.

BEFORE YOUR APPLICATION WINDOW BEGINS

Make your application easy to complete. The very best way to ensure that students actually finish applying is to make it as easy as possible for them to do so! Check out our Universal Application Best Practices for guidance on how to optimize your application for students.

Offer students a way to get in touch if they have questions or problems. Make sure that your contact information is readily available on any flyers, websites, or social media posts that advertise your scholarships. You can also include your contact information within your online application, in case students have trouble as they apply.

DURING YOUR APPLICATION WINDOW

Run the AwardSpring Student Answers report. AwardSpring’s Student Answers report will tell you which applicants have started and not yet finished their applications, along with the specific questions that have not yet been answered. Consider running the report halfway through your application cycle and again a couple of weeks before the application deadline to see what questions are holding students up. It’s common for essays to be completed last; it’s less common for basic demographic questions to keep students from submitting. If straightforward sections are incomplete, you may have confusing instructions in your application.

Check your dashboard when you log in. Your dashboard can also alert you to application problems that are holding students back from submitting. Check for major discrepancies between the number of applicants and the number of completed applications in your dashboard. If you’re approaching your application deadline with less than 50% of applications submitted, it’s time to investigate what the problem is.

Email your stragglers. We recommend sending out just one or two emails to remind students that their applications aren’t yet complete. If you send more than a couple of emails, you may find that applicants begin ignoring your messages, so make them count! Your last reminder email should go out at least a week before your deadline, so that students have plenty of time to track down documents or write essays.

AT THE END OF YOUR APPLICATION WINDOW

Run - and save - a Student Answers report one final time. Since every institution has its own unique application process, typical completion rates vary. It’s best to track yours so that you have a benchmark for future award cycles.

Check for students that haven’t completed additional requirements. At the end of your application window, you may find that some students submitted their general application but haven’t yet completed the additional requirements for specific scholarships. Follow up with those students via email to encourage them to finish the final steps.

Just like conditional questions, additional requirements can help streamline your application while collecting specific information from qualified students. But you can also use AwardSpring’s additional requirements to make administrative tasks easier after awarding. Here are three super useful ways you can use additional requirements:

Further Qualify Students

Additional requirements are useful when asking for essay responses or other information that will help you make award decisions. Since students will only see a scholarship’s additional requirements once they’ve already qualified, you can ask very specific questions without the need for conditional questions. For example, let’s say you have a scholarship for Latinx students with a GPA above 3.5, and you want qualified students to write an essay about what their heritage means to them. Rather than making this essay a conditional question in the main application, where all Latinx students would see it, make it an additional requirement of your scholarship instead.

Employing additional requirements in this way gives you more configurability options if a donor has a long list of qualifications. To increase qualified applicants, we recommend limiting requirements on the main application and including as many additional requirements as you’d like for individual scholarships. This way, donors still get to include their “wish list” of preferred student qualifications without eliminating students from consideration who don’t quite match up.

Manage Post-Award Tasks with Additional Requirements

Another useful way to use additional requirements is to help you manage all of those post-award details that can take up a lot of time. You can require awarded students to upload a thank you letter, confirm their attendance at a celebration dinner, acknowledge that they’re aware of GPA requirements to maintain their award, or take any other actions that you need. Your AwardSpring application will automatically send reminders to students about fulfilling these additional requirements until all tasks are complete.

Maintain Student Eligibility for Renewable Rewards

If you have renewable rewards that require students to periodically reaffirm their eligibility, use additional requirements to collect the information you need. You can ask questions about GPA, a student’s major, or anything else - and only those students who need to answer the questions will see them.

If you have any questions about additional requirements or how best to employ them, contact us at support@awardspring.com.

Promoting your scholarships far and wide is the first step to increasing applicants, but there are two more effective tactics you can employ to ensure those applicants are well qualified:

Tactic #1: Encourage donors to make scholarship stipulations more inclusive

Many donors feel that they should include as many requirements and qualifications as possible to find the perfect scholarship candidate. The truth is, the more requirements a student must meet, the greater the likelihood that none of your applicants will qualify. Encourage donors to reduce their requirements to the most basic level - and to share any preferred qualities above and beyond the minimum, which can help tip the balance when making award decisions. 

Tactic #2: Make it easier for students to complete their application

The easier the application process is for students, the more completed applications you’ll receive. An easy place to start is by reevaluating the questions you ask applicants. How many of those questions yield data that you actually use in awarding decisions? Ask your reviewers what questions and information are most important to them and consider dropping the rest. (Students and reviewers alike will appreciate shorter applications!) Also consider how many recommendation letters are really necessary. Many scholarship applications require three letters of recommendation, but 50% of students’ requests for these letters go unanswered. Would a single letter of recommendation suffice? As for application essays, help students focus by providing clear, specific prompts rather than open-ended, general questions. You can also set essay length limits, which will help students present stronger, well-edited work. 

While these two tactics are sure to expand your pool of qualified applicants no matter how you manage your scholarships, using the AwardSpring system can help even more. Automatic matching, for example, applies students to all opportunities for which they qualify - even those the student may not have known about. To learn more about how AwardSpring can help you increase qualified applicants, contact us for a platform walkthrough.