How AwardSpring Maximizes Fund Utilization

Do you want to enroll more students? Retain more of the students you have? Increase your scholarship offering or donor investment? A simple way to improve upon a host of institutional benchmarks like these is to maximize your scholarship fund utilization. And AwardSpring was designed with several features that help administrators and institutions do just that.

There are three main ways that AwardSpring can help your institution award all of its scholarship dollars:

The student interface is simple and easy to use, which helps nudge more students to finish their application. Simply using AwardSpring can more than double your application volume, which means you’re much more likely to find an excellent candidate for each of your awards. (To make sure those applicants are well qualified, check out some of our tips in this blog post.)

Making the best possible award decisions is about more than just identifying the most qualified candidates. You also need to understand how your award decisions impact your institutional goals. For example, if one of your goals is to cover as much financial need as possible, then financial need should be a focus of your application. Make sure that you’re asking the right questions of your applicants so that you can make better awarding decisions down the line. AwardSpring’s flexible application gives you many options for soliciting information from applicants, and centralizing that information in AwardSpring allows you to use the platform’s tools to visualize and understand that data – leading to a fuller picture of your applicant pool and better decision-making (see below!).

With AwardSpring, administrators have total control over which scholarships they award first, and we can recommend a strategy to ensure that all of your scholarship dollars are awarded to as many students as possible. Start the award process with the scholarship that has the most stringent qualifications and/or the fewest applicants. Then, award the next-toughest scholarship, and so on, until you make your way to the scholarships with plenty of applicant options. AwardSpring will identify the top applicant for each scholarship for you; you’ll also be able to see if that student has already been selected for one of your less accessible awards. If so, you can choose a different recipient to spread more of your scholarship dollars across a larger population.

-Tracy Monin, Fiscal Support Analyst at University of Central Arkansas Foundation, Inc.

Distributing all of your scholarship money each year is a strong sign that your scholarship program is running efficiently, which makes it easier to ask donors for more. With AwardSpring, you can create a feedback loop of utilizing all of your scholarship funds, telling that story (with hard data!) to donors to grow endowments, utilizing your new endowments to their fullest, and starting the cycle over again until you meet your institution’s financial goals.

If you aren’t yet using AwardSpring to maximize fund utilization, contact us at sales@awardspring.com to find out how AwardSpring could transform your scholarship process. Customers with questions about maximizing their fund utilization can always email us at support@awardspring.com for help.