How Coastal Carolina more than tripled scholarship applications (and got two weeks of every cycle back)

Every March, the scholarship team at Coastal Carolina University used to brace for the flood. The application deadline would hit, and roughly 400 emails would pour in over the final two days, every attachment needing to be downloaded, formatted, and filed by hand before a committee could see it. Essays arrived through a separate website entirely.

Across the full 2022-23 cycle, the team manually processed 636 document submissions. At about fifteen minutes each, that was roughly 159 hours spent playing document courier instead of getting scholarship dollars to students.

A change they didn’t choose, and the one they did

Coastal’s process wasn’t manual by preference. Applications ran through a homegrown system stitched into campus software, and when that software reached end of life, the scholarship system it carried went with it. The team needed a new home for the entire cycle, from application through awarding.

There was a second constraint the emails hid: the volume of manual processing had forced Coastal to run two separate application cycles a year, each held to 50 or 60 scholarships, because the team couldn’t handle the Foundation’s full 120-plus opportunities at once.

They chose AwardSpring in September 2022 and went live that February 2nd, with AwardSpring carrying most of the implementation. The change showed up first with students: two application cycles became one window.

Instead of checking boxes in one system and emailing documents to another, a Coastal student now completes one application and is automatically matched to every fund they qualify for. Additional requirements are requested and collected inside the same portal. Automated reminders chase the missing pieces, which the team credits with keeping incomplete applications low even as volume grew.

And volume grew. 811 applications in the last year of the old process became 1,911 in the first full year on AwardSpring, and 2,693 this year. This spring, 354 students received 456 awards, nearly $1 million in scholarship support.

The two-week dividend

For Kelli Fookes, Senior Assistant Director of Scholarships and Financial Aid, the difference is measured in calendar pages: the two weeks she used to spend processing documents after every deadline came back. Committee members who once received paper packets now review digitally. The giant color-coded matching spreadsheets are gone.

The platform also took over a job nobody misses: student technical support. AwardSpring handles student questions directly, and Coastal has watched that support work even when the problem wasn’t AwardSpring’s. When a broken link in a campus email was quietly blocking student logins, AwardSpring’s support team caught it and flagged it first.

“Trust AwardSpring to do what it says it can do”

Dr. Samantha Hicks, Assistant Vice President of Financial Aid and Scholarships, is direct about the lesson from four years on the platform. Early on, her team re-checked the platform’s matching by hand out of caution. In four years, those checks have never found an incorrect match that traced to the platform.

Her advice to peers evaluating a change is to skip the years of hedging: lean in fully and let the platform do the job it was built for.

“Don’t be afraid.”

Kelli Fookes, Senior Assistant Director of Scholarships and Financial Aid

What’s next at Coastal

The scholarship program’s results have drawn interest across campus, and expanding the platform’s reach to academic scholarships has come up. The team that once spent March buried in email attachments now spends it telling the university’s scholarship story with data.