Scholarships are more important nowadays than ever before. Coronavirus has hit students so hard that many college graduates are thinking about putting off going to college for another year or not going to college at all.
If you’re a business owner thinking about starting a scholarship fund, but you think that managing a scholarship is hard work, let me give you in on a little secret – it’s not.
Managing a scholarship in 2020 is easier than ever before. Here’s why.
All of the tedious work can be automated
No one likes paperwork. No one is a fan of collecting applications, sending out emails to successful applicants, letting them know that they’ve gone to the next round, etc. Not only does this take a truckload of time, but it also requires you to assign these tasks to someone in your team. Even worse, you may have to hire someone to take care of these administrative tasks.
Modern scholarship management software has built-in features that take care of this work for you. There is a single dashboard that manages student applications and sends out emails to students at different stages of the scholarship management process. All you have to do is set the requirements and wait for the best applicant.
You don’t have to worry about an application page
Think of the scholarships you’ve seen before. In most cases, students have to apply by email, sending in their application materials. This is inconvenient for both the students and the organization awarding the scholarship. Think of all the students that gave up on applying the moment they realized they now have to spend hours to send that email to you.
Nowadays, modern scholarship management applications have a better way for students to apply to your scholarships. Besides the scholarship application form, they also provide a nice web page where students can fill out their details, attach a document or two, and bam – they’re ready to go. Instead of writing emails for hours, they can take care of the application in 20 minutes. The best part is, they can pause in the middle of the application and finish in a few hours or even days.
You don’t have to worry about money when managing a scholarship
The scholarship award is without a doubt, the most important part of every scholarship. Yet, so many business owners and managers forget about it. After all, if a scholarship is open for a month, you may even forget to choose the winners and send out their rewards.
With modern apps, this aspect of managing a scholarship is easier than ever. For example, one of the newest features in ScholarshipApp is the scholarship escrow. Before you even launch a scholarship, you can put the scholarship amount in an escrow. That way, you don’t have to worry about paying out the scholarship once you find your winner. Moreover, the applicants will know that the award money is secure and that they will certainly be paid if they win.
The applicant data doesn’t go to waste
Think about how much more you could be getting from the data which your applicants give you. The applicant of today could become one of your best employees tomorrow. However, if you’re using emails for applications, you’ll never know who the best people are. And one year later, you just might want to find your best applicants to offer them a job or an internship.
Modern scholarship management software acts as a CRM and stores all of your applicants’ info so that you can access it at any point and even filter it according to different criteria.
Wrapping up
Managing a scholarship may have been extremely difficult a decade ago. Nowadays, scholarship management apps like ScholarshipApp make it easier than ever to do something good for all of our futures and help out a student in need.
By the way, did you know that ScholarshipApp is completely free to use? You can launch your next scholarship within just 15 minutes! Sign up today to get started!
