Award Cycle Preparation Best Practices

Here at AwardSpring, we’ve seen many award cycles come and go - and we’ve noticed some important preparations that can help an award cycle run like a well-oiled machine. Read on for the steps you can take right now to make your next award cycle your best yet!

Determine when your important milestones will be.

Think about the major functions and events you’ll host over the year – how does your application, review, and awarding process fit in with those dates? When should your application deadline be? When should scholarship money be distributed? Once these dates are settled, it’s much easier to work backward to determine when the application window should open, award decisions should be made, and other important scholarship activities should take place. You may want to consider breaking up a single longer cycle into two shorter ones; two shorter cycles can even overlap if necessary, with our Overlapping Cycles functionality.

Set goals for the year.

Figuring out your biggest priorities up front will help you use your time wisely throughout the award cycle. Are you still coping with retention issues after last year’s COVID-19 disruptions? (If so, here’s a guide to getting your award cycle set up in times of uncertainty.) Is recruitment an important aspect of your scholarship program? Consider requesting custom reports to help you track recruitment, retention, and more. Is equitable awarding a focus? What about your endowment - do you plan to give it all away, or reserve some portion of it for next year?

Prepare for the worst, but expect the best.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a reminder that anything can happen to derail your plans. Make sure you have a plan for maintaining your award program if something new were to go wrong on campus or in your community, or if we have to return to lockdowns this year. Your AwardSpring platform is already configured to support remote work but reviewers, administrators, and students may benefit from remote work communication tips and a reminder that they can access their accounts on any device and from anywhere.

Revisit students’ previous questions and problems.

We suggest taking a look back at last year’s biggest problems or most frequent questions to guide you towards impactful changes to make this year. Review correspondence with students, notes you took, or memories you have about any aspect of the application process that proved troublesome.

Confirm all scholarship details.

Review all of your scholarship listings for needed updates before the new award cycle begins. In particular, double check whether the award values and qualifications have changed. If you had a hard time attracting qualified applicants to a particular scholarship in years past, check out our guide on increasing qualified applicants. Making scholarship stipulations more inclusive and improving the application experience for applicants can go a long way toward getting more applicants overall.

Engage donors.

Engaging donors throughout the award cycle can ensure a strong future for your scholarship program. Before a new award cycle starts, consider reaching out to donors to discuss any changes to scholarship requirements, to thank them for their support, and to report their impact on student recipients. You can encourage direct communication between donors and students right in the AwardSpring platform to help donors truly understand the impact of their gift.

Think like a marketer.

Marketers know that it can take 8-20 “touchpoints”, or points of contact with a prospect, before converting a prospect into a customer. Consider that you may need a similar number of contacts with prospective students before you can convert them into applicants! Make sure your prospects hear from you regularly, on a variety of channels, to increase your chances of converting them. Post on social media, send out email reminders, add content to your institution’s home page, and invest in some printed marketing materials – and make sure that your messages are clear, to the point, and have simple, eye-catching calls to action.

Review and update your application.

The final step before starting a new award cycle is to make updates to your application. AwardSpring users may wish to review our previously published blog post about updating your AwardSpring site. For a complete primer specifically focused on applications, check out this guide to optimizing your application.