If you’ve been toying around with the idea of scholarships, you’re not alone. Especially nowadays, with the coronavirus pandemic taking a major toll on students worldwide, scholarships are more precious than ever before. So many students are dropping out at the moment and even more high school seniors are considering skipping the year altogether.
Here are some of the easy steps you can take today if you want to learn how to offer a scholarship. The good news is, it’s actually not as difficult as it may seem. The even better news is, we can help. Let’s dig in.
Determine the budget
The first step when you’re wondering how to offer a scholarship is determining the budget. What’s too much and what’s too little? You need to strike a balance between being too generous and giving a sum that no one is really able to use. However, you don’t really have to guess.
The average award that a student was able to get in 2019 was $9,520. However, not that this amount does not all come from a single scholarship. This is how much an individual awarded student was able to get from all scholarships that they applied to.
Let’s look at a lesson from our sister brand, ScholarshipOwl. There are scholarships as low as $500 and as high as several thousands of dollars. You can do any amount on that spectrum and you will still be able to help someone and you will still get applicants. The most successful students apply for a range of scholarships, getting $100 at a time and decreasing their total student loan costs. There is no amount that is too low or too high – every bit of money counts and helps someone out.
Make a decision – running it yourself or using scholarship management services
Creating a scholarship program is not something you can do in an afternoon. It takes time to create the scholarship, the application page and all the other assets.
Moreover, you have to manage all of the applications that come in, sort them according to different criteria, read the students’ essays and more. In general, it’s a lengthy process that requires lots of time which you may not have.
For this reason, many businesses choose to outsource the work to an agency or use scholarship management services. Sure, you can spend an additional couple of hundred dollars on an agency, but why not save that cost? You can use a platform like ScholarshipApp to manage your own scholarship with minimal time investments. The best part is – ScholarshipApp is completely free.
Whatever you choose, one thing is certain – you will have to manage a lot of emails and data in the cloud. Choose an option that is web-based and lets you collaborate with your team easily.
Determine who needs your help
There are so many categories of students that you can help that the list is practically endless. Specific ages, majors, locations, universities, ethnicities… The list goes on and on. Our recommendation is to keep the scholarships open to a wide audience so that you can get more exposure and more applicants that you can help.
With that being said, one thing that works nowadays is awarding scholarships to students affected by the coronavirus pandemic. In fact, we just recently launched several COVID-19 scholarships and the response has been overwhelming. Starting with amounts as low as $500, these scholarships got a lot of attention and thousands of applicants in a very short time frame.
Conclusion
Before starting any scholarship, there is one thing that you need to know – lots of students need your help. However, most people get worried about the technical aspects of running a scholarship. The reality is, starting a scholarship is easier than ever before and you can take care of the entire process from one place. And that place is ScholarshipApp – the easy and free solution to give out student scholarships in minimal time. Save time and money on scholarships so students can get more!
