Customer Testimonial

We’ve tried a few different ways to manage scholarship applications in our school’s history. First, we had paper applications. Then we switched to a free online application about two years ago. A year later, we started using Google Forms. But even with online applications, our process was very manual, because there is so much more to scholarship management than just the applications.

We spent a lot of time documenting all of our processes and needs before shopping around for a better software solution. There was a lot to consider; we needed the software to streamline all aspects of scholarship management, be affordable, and come from a company that would stick around to help us if we needed it. We knew all of that would help us get buy-in from other folks at Grayson. In the course of our evaluations, AwardSpring rose to the top as a really fantastic program that does everything their competitors do and more!

Our AwardSpring implementation was really smooth, and our implementation manager was very supportive. I loved it when she said, “If you have something on paper, give it to us and we’ll enter it for you.” I mean, wow – how many companies would say that? It really calmed my main fear: messing up when creating a scholarship. Our implementation manager did a lot of the setup for us that we were nervous about, and explained every step she took. All my fears were gone at the end and we are really happy with the setup.

Now that I’m on the other side, I can’t believe what we went through before. I used to sort through 500-800 applications by hand to determine the scholarships for which each applicant was qualified. Now, AwardSpring does that for me automatically. During review, we’d sit down for a whole day with the reviewers, just going through the applications that I had already weeded out for them. Everyone would fight and talk over each other. Since we didn’t have a great rating scale, decisions were basically made based on who could talk the loudest. That’s been totally eliminated now; with AwardSpring, an individual reviewer doesn’t even know what the other reviewers have said in their evaluations.

AwardSpring has totally changed how we gather information for making decisions, too. In the past, if anyone ever asked me for data about our applicants or recipients, it would take me at least half a day to review every single one of our applications to answer the question. Now I just pop into AwardSpring and print a report. And now I have the data I need to demonstrate need to our donors, which is helping us raise more funds.

In the past, manual scholarship administration added up to about 100 hours of overtime from February through September. Now, I might put in just 20 hours of overtime. It’s saved us a lot of money. And my sanity! I used to have a lot of stress when it came to the awarding process, because I had to map out all of my funds in a spreadsheet and be very cautious not to award more funds than I had available. That’s all gone now; once I enter my funds in AwardSpring, the platform ensures that I never award more than that total. I’m not the only one who is appreciative of the experience AwardSpring makes possible; one of our reviewers recently told me that AwardSpring is the best use of her time. Now she can review applications at her leisure at any time during her two-week review period, which means she can give more careful thought to her responses.

It’s also made life so much easier for our students. They can go into the platform to accept scholarships, upload necessary documents, and they’re done. I think we’ve had about a 10% increase in applications, and that’s just the start. I know there are steps we can take to increase the number of students who complete applications they’ve started, too.

Overall, AwardSpring is a great program and we have had a great experience using it. AwardSpring has made all aspects of our scholarship process better, and we highly recommend it!

___

Cindy Perez

Scholarship Coordinator