Thinking about creating your own scholarship? There are two ways to go about it: doing all of the work on your own and doing it the right way. Lots of business owners consider scholarships so important that they want to handle all of the information on their own. However, there is a smarter way to launch a scholarship as a business owner: using a scholarship manager.
If you want to find out why a scholarship manager is the better way to set up, manage and give out a scholarship, read on.
You’ll save lots of time on emails
The biggest benefit of a scholarship manager application for business owners is that you’ll spend less time sending out emails. Every time a student applies and moves on to the next round in the scholarship application process, it’s a good idea to send them an email. There’s only one problem – the average scholarship gets hundreds to thousands of applications and sending out an email manually to each one can take hours per week.
Instead, automate and delegate. Using a scholarship manager, you can set up triggers for each action that happens with your scholarship. Someone applies – they get a scholarship. Once they’ve moved on to the next round, they will get another email. Finally, they’ll get another one when they win the scholarship or get disqualified. You don’t have to write these emails yourself and you don’t have to hire someone else to take the work off your plate.
You don’t have to spend time choosing the best applicant
Most days, I can’t even decide what to eat for breakfast. Choosing is hard, especially if you have to choose which student to help and whose financial situation you will improve. When you have hundreds of people to choose from, you can really feel overwhelmed. Of course, you don’t have to do any of that.
When you use a scholarship manager, you can set up your own conditions and requirements. If a candidate meets them, the manager pushes them to the next round. You can then have all the applicants that meet your requirements in one place and the manager can randomly choose one from the lot. If, however, you want to choose based on your own judgment, you can manually go through their applications or read their essays. The bottom line is – you don’t have to suffer the burden of choosing anymore.
You don’t have to create the additional materials
Giving out a scholarship is much more than picking someone from a lot of applicants and giving them some money. If you want students to enjoy the process and your scholarship to get noticed by the media and colleges, you need much more than that.
Primarily, you need to create a dedicated page and a process for applications. That would require hiring a web developer and a designer just to create a page where students can apply, as well as the entire application process, including the requirements and different stages. Needless to say, this can be very time-consuming.
You can integrate different apps with your scholarship manager
Instead of just having your scholarship applicants in your app, you can do more with their data. For example, you can automatically store their emails in your CRM using Zapier. You can grab their Twitter accounts and follow them automatically. You can put them on a special email list and automatically segment them according to their location, university, major or whatever else comes to mind. You can even get their profile in your applicant tracking system to get them on a path to become your employee.
The bottom line is, you can use Zapier to do more with your applicants’ data than just letting it sit in an Excel spreadsheet.
You can use a scholarship manager from anywhere
If there’s anything that the coronavirus pandemic taught us, it’s that most things can and should be done remotely. When you use a scholarship manager, you’re accessing it from the cloud and you can manage your applications from anywhere you want. You can collaborate with your team on a scholarship even if you’re dispersed all over the world.
Conclusion
Awarding a scholarship should not be hard work and take weeks of your free time. It should be a process that rewards students financially and gives you media coverage, new business and opportunities to get noticed by partners. If you use a scholarship manager – you can make this happen. Let the app do the heavy lifting, you can be there to award the students and enjoy the attention.
We have just what it takes – ScholarshipApp lets you create and manage scholarships for free, from the cloud. All it takes is 15 minutes to sign up and make someone’s life better, as well as get more eyes on your business. Sign up today to get started!
