Maximizing Scholarship Fund Utilization

Maximizing the use of your scholarship funds is a simple way to improve upon a host of institutional benchmarks - and AwardSpring can help you do it.

First, identify your institution’s goals so you can understand how full fund utilization can help. Do you want to enroll more students? Retain more of the students you have? Focusing on fund utilization can contribute to your success achieving a wide range of goals, including helping as many students as possible, increasing donor investment, improving retention, and increasing enrollment.

There are three ways that AwardSpring can help your institution award all of its scholarship dollars:

Increasing Your Applicant Pool

The student interface is simple and easy to use, which helps nudge more students to finish their application - or begin one in the first place. Simply using AwardSpring can more than double your application volume, which means you’re much more likely to find an excellent candidate for each of your awards. To make sure those applicants are well qualified, check out some of our tips in this blog post.

Collecting Critical Student Information

Making the best possible award decisions is about more than just identifying the most qualified candidates. You also need to understand how your award decisions impact your institutional goals. For example, if one of your goals is to cover as much financial need as possible, then financial need should be a focus of your application. Make sure that you’re asking the right questions of your applicants so that you can make better awarding decisions down the line. AwardSpring’s flexible application gives you many options for soliciting information from applicants.

Making Strategic Award Decisions

With AwardSpring, administrators have total control over which scholarships they award first - and we can recommend a strategy to ensure that all of your scholarship dollars are awarded to as many students as possible. Start the award process with the scholarship that has the most stringent qualifications and/or the fewest applicants. Then, award the next-toughest scholarship, and so on, until you make your way to the scholarships with plenty of applicant options. AwardSpring will identify the top applicant for each scholarship for you; you’ll also be able to see if that student has already been selected for one of your less accessible awards. If so, you can choose a different recipient to spread more of your scholarship dollars across a larger population.

Distributing all of your scholarship money each year is a strong sign that your scholarship program is running efficiently. If you have any questions about strategies to maximize your fund utilization, contact us at support@awardspring.com.