Customer Testimonial

When I first started as the Director of North Kansas City Schools Education Foundation in 2022, the foundation was giving out about $100,000 a year in scholarships from 50 unique funds that we managed in partnership with community organizations. This was an incredibly manual process—each of those scholarship opportunities was displayed on our website on a separate word document, and each application was on a separate word document.

Because all of these scholarship opportunities had different amounts, criteria, and requirements, students had to click on each one individually to see if they qualified. They then had to complete each of those individual word documents and submit them to apply, repeating a lot of that same information over and over.

Walking into that, the prospect of managing the scholarships this way terrified me. I was a team of one and scholarships are not all we do, so it was super intimidating.

It was also clear that this system was ineffective for the students. We are the second-largest school district in Missouri, but we had very few applicants for our scholarships. We have thousands of graduating seniors every year, but we were receiving fewer than 200 applicants—so the math was not adding up. I also did not feel that what I was seeing with our scholarship recipients reflected the diverse demographics of our school district.

It was clear that we needed to make a change. In order to ensure that we found the right scholarship management software, I did as many demos and took as many sales calls as I could. The biggest thing that set AwardSpring apart was the ability to create a universal application. This way, students could easily seek out the opportunities that they were qualified for, and they could log in and save their progress on their applications.

The ability to blind the scholarship applications was also huge. DEI initiatives are really important to our school district, and so I really wanted to eliminate as much bias as possible in our review process. Blinding applications through the universal application made this possible.

AwardSpring has helped us in so many other ways, too. We can easily track scholarships and capture post-award reporting info, like senior photos, acceptance letters, and ID numbers, and we can use this to create personalized thank you letters for our donors.

The support system we received from AwardSpring was excellent from the beginning. What we started with was a monster of a problem. I had to send AwardSpring all of those 50+ scholarship forms that we began with, and our implementation manager did an incredible job of sifting through and developing a universal application that could fit all of them. The check-ins were very timely, and our implementation manager was super thoughtful and great at explaining everything. We developed a genuine, strong relationship.

All of that being said, the system itself is pretty intuitive. Our implementation manager guided us through it all, but it also intrinsically makes sense. I felt comfortable taking over once she walked us through it.

The results have been astonishing. Before we began with AwardSpring in 2023, we had 189 applicants. In just one year with AwardSpring, this jumped to 575—that’s a 204% increase in applicants.

I would absolutely recommend AwardSpring to those looking for scholarship management. The demos that were provided exceeded our expectations, there are continuous improvements and added features that provide more benefits, and the pricing is very competitive, even with groups that didn’t offer the same features. Overall, AwardSpring has made a world of a difference for us, our students, and donors! 

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Midori Carpenter

Foundation Director