Testimonial: South Louisiana Community College
Customer Testimonial
Customer Testimonial
South Louisiana Community College
133 Scholarships
1,355 Applicants
Customer Since 2013
When I first came on board at the college, I was surprised to discover that the institution was still using paper applications for each individual scholarship opportunity. It created a crazy amount of work for both students and administrators! I knew that we could improve our process with an online solution.
In 2014, I moved into a Director of Development role and was focused on awarding the scholarships we already had as well as attaining new ones from donors. AwardSpring helped me achieve my goals.
In 2012, when we were still using a paper-based process, we had fewer than 10 scholarship opportunities and each one had a separate application. Once we moved our process online with AwardSpring, we saw a dramatic increase in both scholarships and applications. We now have more than five times as many scholarships, and we receive more than ten times as many completed applications!
In addition to contributing to our explosive growth in scholarships and applicants, AwardSpring has made the entire scholarship experience easier for everyone by drastically streamlining our process. Prior to AwardSpring, the scholarship committee would meet for a whole afternoon, read through all applications, and come to a consensus on awarding each scholarship. It was very time- and labor-intensive. Now everyone’s experience is better.
Committee members can review from the comfort of their home or office instead of driving to the main campus and spending a whole day working through applications. Students can complete an application on their phone while they are waiting for classes or at home in their pajamas. With campuses in nine different counties, we want to make sure our scholarship committee is diverse, with staff and faculty from different departments as well as different campuses. We can easily achieve that now with AwardSpring.
AwardSpring is crucial to helping us achieve other institutional goals.
For example, we are all focused
on increasing the recruitment, retention, and completion of all students at SLCC. We work closely with AwardSpring to track how many students start an application as well as how many finish and actually apply to the scholarships. As we grow and add scholarships, AwardSpring’s support
team is always willing to revisit the application and help us make sure it is as sleek and condensed as possible, so students are more likely to finish their applications. AwardSpring reports have played a crucial role in helping us continually increase our rate of application completion.
Scholarship growth has been a very powerful recruiting tool for us. Data gathered between AwardSpring and our institutional effectiveness office shows that scholarship recipients have higher GPAs, are retained at a higher rate, and are more likely to graduate or transfer to a four-year university. We see that scholarship recipients are more successful as a whole than non-scholarship recipients.
Our Development Officer now administers our growing scholarship program, and she is impressed with AwardSpring’s customer service. As we grow, AwardSpring seems to anticipate our needs.
If we ask for functionality that AwardSpring doesn’t yet have, the response is usually that it will be coming in an upcoming product release. And I’m really impressed by the customer service. If there is something we need, we can always get on the phone with our support team and find the perfect solution, whether it’s creating a new custom report, adding a question to the application to better filter students, or running a query. The support team is so responsive; I typically get a reply to my questions or issues within a few hours, which is so refreshing! And
I appreciate that they always make sure their solution fits our needs and that our process is as successful as possible. Scholarship management and awarding is very timely, so the responsiveness of AwardSpring’s support team really sets them apart and makes my job easier.
AwardSpring has truly transformed our scholarship management process and made us so more efficient as an organization.
We have received only positive feedback about AwardSpring; the platform is very straightforward and has become part of the SLCC culture.
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Lana Fontenot
Vice Chancellor for Institutional Advancement
& Executive Director,
SLCC Foundation at South Louisiana Community College
Morgen Landry
Development Officer