It’s the age of the coronavirus pandemic and you want to do some good for the students struggling to pay for their education. So, you decide to launch a scholarship. The only problem is, you think it’s fairly simple and that all it takes is giving some money away and that you’ll be done within a day. Then reality hits you and you realize things are not so simple.
So, you decide to try out some scholarship management services instead, to save time and money. Here’s why that’s a bad idea.
Scholarship management services don’t come cheap
At the heart of it, launching and giving and scholarship means a lot of work. Each scholarship requires a dedicated website or landing page, tons of promotional emails, outreach to universities and journalists, collecting applications, sorting them, selecting the best applicant, etc. The bottom line is, it takes weeks or preparation and another few weeks to run the scholarship and award the best student.
Depending on the person you hire, scholarship management services can cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars. While that may not be an issue for a business like yours, isn’t it a better idea to forward that money to the students? Instead of spending an additional $1,000 on managing a scholarship, you can save the cost and give out another $1,000 scholarship to a student in need.
Especially if you plan to award scholarships more than once, the amount stacks up over time and it’s far better to spend it on the actual scholarship.
You have to share lots of data
The very act of giving away a scholarship will grab attention for your business. However, the best scholarships are unique. The reason for starting them is special, the eligibility criteria are unique and the scholarship will get picked up by journalists and different outlets more easily.
If you run your scholarship on your own, this is not an issue because you know your business and your story better than anyone. However, if you use scholarship management services, you will need to provide constant input to the person/organization you hire for the job. Eventually, you’ll spend so much time on guidance that you could have easily done the job yourself.
You will still have to do a lot of work on your own
No matter how much you pay for scholarship management services, there are very few companies that offer a turnkey solution. While they can help you set up the technical aspects of a scholarship, that’s not the most crucial part of the scholarship that determines its success.
The thing that sets one scholarship apart from the rest is how it is promoted. And for that, you have to do a lot of promotion on your own. Think of your business partners, friends, family, people that follow you on social media, schools and universities in your area. Sure, you can trust someone else to do the promotion, but you’ve already built a relationship with them and it would be better to reach out personally.
While some industries such as eCommerce will allow you more time and room for activities like scholarships, the truth is that it’s far better to spend the time on those activities that bring you a better return on investment.
You want full access to all applicants’ data
If you’ve been reading our blog, you know that scholarships have a variety of benefits for your business. Among others, you can (and should) store all of your applicants’ data in a separate database for later recruitment purposes. Some of your best applicants today can be your employees tomorrow – scholarships are a great and cost-effective way to build a network of potential job candidates.
Moreover, having access to all of your data means that you can get the finer details of each scholarship. Which group of students apply the most, what your best channels for promotion are, how many leads you get from your scholarship and its promotion, etc. When you use scholarship management services, you run the risk of that information being held away from you.
What to use instead
Why trust a stranger to set up and manage your scholarship if you can do everything instead, and at no cost? By using ScholarshipApp to launch your next scholarship, you can get started from the idea to a published scholarship in as little as 15 minutes. Best of all, ScholarshipApp is completely free to use and every scholarship you create using it also gets posted on our scholarship aggregation website, ScholarshipOwl.
Don’t trust others to do the good work for you – use ScholarshipApp to give more to students and spend less time on the technicalities of your scholarships.
