Simplify Your Day-to-Day by Leveraging the Cloud

Whether you’re a foundation serving a unique constituency or an accredited college or university serving your student body, being able to efficiently award your applicants is a time-consuming, multi-layered process. You have to juggle applicants (who may be using many varying applications), piece together their final submission, figure out how to match them to the various awards you offer, and get them scored and awarded, all while keeping your donors in the know and satisfied with your approach. More than likely, you’re doing this with too small a staff, or in some cases, entirely on your own. This can be frustrating for everyone involved as your applicants may be confused, your donors may be lacking valuable insight, and, most importantly, you may be inundated with the volume of work and the dollars you’re leaving on the table un-awarded.

To exacerbate the issue, it’s difficult to rely on your own IT team to deliver tools you need to ease the tension that exists in the award management process. To be fair, in a vast majority of cases, this isn’t even your IT team’s fault as they are also spread too thin and have too many competing priorities to properly service your organization. In many instances, the combination of supporting a large Student Information System (SIS), coupled with managing the core custom applications the IT organization has built, is too herculean a task to keep tackling – leaving smaller custom applications or the management of other infrastructure by the wayside and core systems in “maintenance mode”.

There’s a solution for these problems, however. Leveraging a cloud-based platform to manage a business-critical task like award management can benefit your organization in two meaningful ways:

Let us take a few minutes to better understand these benefits.

Cloud Partners & Focus

When you decide to take a core operational process, in this instance, your award management process, to a cloud partner, you should immediately presume some significant benefits. I’ll outline some key benefits in a moment, but first I want to talk about why these new benefits even exist. The answer, quite simply, is focus.

As a cloud-based, or more accurately, a Software as a Service or SaaS, partner ourselves, we focus solely on delivering the best awards management platform we can possibly deliver. We over-focus on scholarships as our “awards” as that’s been our historical area of expertise, but we think largely about focusing on award management as many other award types are analogous to scholarships. Everything we do can be traced back to building the best possible awards management platform and delivering user-focused, friendly, and personalized onboarding and support. We aren’t bogged down by other products or competing internal initiatives. That’s a level of focus very few, if any, internal IT teams can provide. This level of focus allows you, as a user of a SaaS awards management platform, to make positive, meaningful changes to your day-to-day.

Time Spent (we like to call this “Time Recovered”). When you start to take advantage of the benefits of a SaaS awards management platform, you should immediately see a shift in how you spend your time. Staff that normally tracks down completed applications, collates submissions, matches applicants to awards, coordinates reviewers and their scores, and makes awarding decisions can now rely on the platform to do a majority of this heavy lifting. This allows you and your team more time to spend helping students find the path to financial support and engaging with your donors to either drive increased gifting or identify new donor sources, or both.

Constant Innovation. Having a partner that provides this kind of focus should also guarantee you that you’ll be provided new features to help increase your efficiency, drive more completed applicants, connect you to your donors, and provide you insight into your performance. These kinds of enhancements, both to your software and the support you receive for it, are difficult to achieve with an internally developed solution.

A Trusted Partner. Here are some quotes that may seem cliché, but will ring true with any good SaaS partner: “We’re in it with you.” or “Your success is our success.” A good partner will always think this way. In our example, every single staff member likes to think of themselves as an extension of your office. Our onboarding and support teams want to understand your application, your opportunities and awards, and your constituents as well as you understand them. By embedding ourselves in your unique processes, we create a really interesting feedback loop: We learn your operations and become experts in your processes. » This knowledge gives us ideas for how to better build our SaaS platform and improve our support processes. » These improvements create more efficiency for you and your team.

Reducing IT Burden

You might be wondering how exactly adding a SaaS partner to the mix can reduce the burden on your IT staff. There’s actually quite a bit of research that has gone into this, and there’s a particularly good white paper that was released by Oracle in 2014 that covers these concepts in significant detail in case you’re interested in exploring it further (or if you’d like to provide some additional supporting data to your own IT team when pitching the concept of using cloud services). But on the surface, the benefits for your IT team boil down to a few key points:

Staff Reduction or Repurposing. By moving core business processes to the cloud, your IT team can either get along with fewer resources thanks to the smaller internal IT footprint or these IT folks can be repurposed to focus on other core initiatives.

Reduced Operating Costs. As your organization embraces the cloud, your IT team will see their footprint reduced, which drives down expenses on physical infrastructure, licenses, and other overhead related to hosting and maintaining business-critical applications.

Improved Performance and Scalability. When you partner with a SaaS provider, performance and system availability generally become cornerstones of delivery. For example, we pride ourselves on building specific Service Level Agreements (SLAs) into our contracts that give our partners something tangible to expect out of the performance of our platform. In order to meet these requirements, your SaaS partner must keep their environments flexible to scale as you grow (and their volume of partners grows).

Hopefully the tangible benefits I’ve outlined that are created by a partnering with a focused SaaS provider encourage you to take the plunge into moving your awards management processes to the cloud. Taking this step not only benefits you and this core business process, but also helps reduce the strain on your IT staff, creating wins across your organization, and most importantly with your applicants and donors. And for what it’s worth – we’d love it if you took the plunge with us. Drop us a note if you’d like to hear more.

Thanks, and come join us in the cloud.

Kurt Reilly
Co-Founder & CEO
AwardSpring