The scholarship meeting that took two days: Richmond Community College's first year on AwardSpring

When Dr. Wendy Kelly Jordan arrived at Richmond Community College’s Foundation after 30 years in the county’s schools, scholarship matching meant a room full of people for nearly two full days, and donor records lived in multiple spreadsheets. One cycle later, the room and the spreadsheets are both retired.

Richmond Community College serves more than 2,300 curriculum students in Hamlet, North Carolina. Its Foundation office is two people: Dr. Wendy Kelly Jordan, Associate Vice President for Development, and Lisa Harrelson, its Accounting and Donor Relations Specialist. Wendy is new to higher ed fundraising and not remotely new to Richmond County: she spent 30 years with the county’s public schools, graduated from RCC herself, and stepped into the Foundation role in May 2025. Her first scholarship cycle came with a system everyone already wanted gone.

A room full of people, twice a year

Matching students to scholarships used to require representatives from across the college in one room: engineering, nursing, finance, general education, financial aid, and others, a true cross-section of the college, working alongside the Foundation staff. For nearly two full days they worked through applicants one at a time, matching by memory and personal story. The old platform kept the numbers somewhere, but finding them was its own project: even a simple application count was difficult to locate and navigate to. And its application asked students to read through every eligibility question individually. “Everybody complained about it,” Wendy says, “but nobody did anything to move past it.”

So the college pulled the trigger. Emily Jarrell, the college’s Director of Financial Aid, had used AwardSpring at a previous institution and liked it, and one thing set it apart in the evaluation: scholarship management and donor management on one platform, which meant the Foundation’s donor records, spread across multiple spreadsheets with addresses that disagreed with each other, finally had one home too.

“Everybody complained about it, but nobody did anything to move past it. So we pulled the trigger.”

The first cycle, by the numbers

In its first year on AwardSpring, the Foundation ran 120 scholarships through the platform and students submitted more than 500 applications, a count the old system would have made a chore to find. The application itself got shorter for students: categorized checkboxes replaced the one-by-one eligibility questions. The feedback Wendy trusts most came from students she has known since middle school, who told her the application was easy and took hardly any time. The financial aid office saw the same thing from its side: a noticeably faster process, with more students finishing what they started.

“I called students I have known since middle school and asked what they thought. They said it was so easy, it hardly took any time.”

The chase, moved into award acceptance

The win Wendy is proudest of is one she used to feel personally. Last year, confirming who was coming to the scholarship banquet took her about three solid days on the phone: calls, voicemails, callbacks, and a spreadsheet log of every attempt. This year, attendance is asked and answered as a post-award task: when students formally accept their scholarship, they attest that they will attend, yes or no, with no maybe. Awards go out in July and August with the November 5 banquet date in view, which gives students two to three months to make arrangements, and, as Wendy puts it, there is a responsibility tied to acceptance. The follow-up conversation now belongs to the student, not to three days of Wendy’s calendar.

“It probably took me three solid days on the phone just to find out who was coming to the banquet. Now students answer that question when they accept the award.”

One record for donors, next

With the scholarship cycle behind her, Wendy’s attention is on the donor side: 337 donors are already in the system, four campaigns are loaded, and the fundraising ribbon shows exactly where each campaign stands against its goal. After a year of duplicate spreadsheets and returned mail, she is direct about what she wants from it: one record, kept right, everywhere at once. “It’s just made us more efficient,” she says, “and our Donor Relations Specialist has said the same thing.”

Year two

Ask her what she would tell a peer college on a reference call and the answer is about friction: the platform is intuitive, the information is never more than a couple of clicks away, and in a full year it has never once failed to load. Now that the whole team has been through a cycle, she expects year two to be faster still.

“You can just get in there and it’s very intuitive. There’s not a whole lot of clicking to get to the information you want.”