Institutions We Serve: Education Foundations

Foundation scholarships are an important source of educational funding for many students. That’s just one reason we’re always thrilled to onboard a new foundation to our platform. Another reason? Our platform and support can make a huge positive impact on a foundation’s scholarship program, creating efficiencies that ultimately result in bigger endowments and more time for foundations to focus on their mission. We see this as a net good for everyone – at the foundation, the school, and in the community.

We’ve been fortunate to work with many different foundations, each with its own unique service model. Most are education foundations, connected to primary through post-secondary schools. Some support community organizations. And others, like the Consortium of Florida Education Foundations (CFEF), are unique coalitions of many education foundations. Each foundation pursues different student profiles for their giving; some give to students on a specific career path, for example, while others may give based on need. Despite the differences between the foundations we support, we’ve found that each one has benefited from working with us. In part, that’s because we really understand and appreciate their mission to give; that’s the first step to providing the kind of support that makes a difference. But our platform is also built in a way that truly serves foundations.

Here are just a few ways that education foundations benefit from our scholarship management solution:

• Pricing: Our pricing model accommodates all sizes of foundation scholarship offerings. Those foundations with just one to five awards are well served by our AwardSpring NOW platform, with affordable monthly pricing. AwardSpring PRO has competitive pricing for foundations with more than five scholarships. And if a foundation has hundreds of scholarships, they too will find a cost-effective solution with us.

• Partnership: Foundations are generally short-staffed or run by volunteers, which can make it challenging to run a scholarship program well. Partnering with AwardSpring is like scaling up your scholarship team; our staff is extremely knowledgeable and hands-on, helping our foundation customers build and scrutinize their programs to make them more efficient. Over time, foundations can leverage the time and energy savings they accrue to focus on other endeavors, like growing their gift-giving funnels and engaging donors. Working with us is like adding a full-time employee while removing operational overhead, increasing efficiency, and adding more institutional knowledge.

• Platform: We have a host of platform features that help foundations increase the efficiency of their application collection, review, and scoring processes, which creates opportunity for better decision-making and data usage. And since applying for scholarships is so easy on our platform, foundations can expect to increase their applicant count significantly. A higher applicant count is the key first step to growing an endowment; with more applicants, foundation administrators have the momentum they need to ask donors for more funds.

“At the Foundation, we have seen a dramatic increase in the overall number of applications we receive. AwardSpring has drastically cut down on the time and effort required from all parties involved with the process. AwardSpring has also helped us generate more donors and illustrate our involvement to the community… I’ll just say that we couldn’t be where we are now and on our way to where we are headed without AwardSpring.”

- Karen McDonald, Board Member & Treasurer, Scholarship Foundation of Northshore