So, you know you want to launch a scholarship. You’ve decided on the title, the award, who is going to compete for it, and what requirements you’re asking from them. You have a nice landing page and everything seems ready.
Or almost everything. There’s always that thought in the back of your mind that maybe you’ll finish the scholarships with no applications. Or even worse, with only 3 applications.
We’ve had those thoughts ourselves, and we’ve worked with many providers that have been through that. This is why we’ve put together this guide, that will teach you what steps to take to make sure your scholarship is a success.
Step 1. Outreach to a group of public, private and charter school college counselors
Why? The reason is that…
a school counselor is someone who gives valuable assistance to students, helping them with their academic goals, their social and personal development, and with their career development.
Career Explorer
You want to reach them, to talk to them and to ask them to spread the word about your scholarship. Students are looking up to them, they are asking them for advice. Should I continue?
Where to find them? There are about 117,000,000 results (0.49 seconds) when you search for “School counselor list” on Google.
Step 2. Outreach to independent education consultants
Why? Because they work pretty much in the same way as school counselors. The independent counselors are maybe even more attached to their students and their job is to make sure the students succeed in graduating debt-free. This is their motivation, and your scholarship will help them achieve just that.
Step 3. Emails to your existing subscribers
Why? You’ve already built a community with your audience. You have their best interest at heart and they want to have a reason to talk about you and the good you do to everyone. So, it only makes sense for you to let them know that you have launched your scholarship.
How? If you don’t have that segment defined into your emailing list, just send an email to everyone. They can apply themselves or forward that email to someone that will apply. If you don’t have them at all in your list, and you have your scholarship hosted on ScholarshipApp, our iframe is collecting those emails for you in the “downtime” of your scholarship. Once it’s live, they will all find out:
Step 4. Posts on social media
Why? Because whether we like it or not, social media is today what newspaper was yesterday. Because virtually all the students are on social media – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snap, Tik Tok – you name it.
How? Create a plan for your social media depending on the platform you’re posting to. For example, if you post on Twitter make sure you’re putting the link to your entry form.
Scholarship Alert: (Your Scholarship Name Here) – $1,000 scholarship, and you don’t even have to write an essay. Can’t get easier than this (link to your scholarship form here)
If you don’t have an easy form, you can use the one from ScholarshipApp (which is easy to place on your WordPress), or you can use one of our templates.
Step 5. Requests to post on other scholarship search engines
Why? Same as in the case of social media, it’s simply because that is the place where you’ll find students. Why do people go on google? Because they have intent of finding something. Why do scholarship engines exist? Because students go there with the intent of finding a scholarship.
How? There are a lot of scholarship directories out there, Fastweb, Cappex, ScholarshipOwl, etc. We have an automatic integration with ScholarshipOwl, and we’re helping you get in front of over 5 million students that are looking to apply for your scholarship.
So, if you’re looking to be on ScholarshipOwl, simply go to the Integrations > ScholarshipOwl from your ScholarshipApp account and check the status of your integration.
Step 6. Paid ads on Facebook and Instagram
Why? What does Facebook love more than to see you using their platform? (That’s an easy one) They want to see you advertise on their platform. And today we have the advantage of being able to run ads very cheaply.
How? You don’t even have to go to the business manager to set up a campaign. You can boost your post because you need engagement on your scholarship. This is an easy one 😉
Conclusion
So, having a scholarship is a great thing. You’re giving back to students, helping them become better people. But better than that is having a scholarship that people know about. Make sure you’re doing all the steps described in this article:
- Outreach to school and independent counselors
- Email your existing subscribers
- Post on social media
- Request to be posted on different scholarship directories
- Run ads on Facebook and Instagram
- Use ScholarshipApp to centralize, review, rank, and award a winner
