Eastern West Virginia Community Foundation has served the Jefferson, Berkeley, and Morgan counties in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia for 25 years. Each year, the Foundation awards more than $1M in grants and scholarships to local students, and until 2020, this was an entirely manual process.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, we realized that we needed to incorporate more technology into our scholarship administration process. We had been accepting paper applications (many hand-delivered by high school administrators!), but that process had already resulted in human errors that prevented worthy applicants from being considered.

With the world moving to a remote working model, it was the right time to find a scholarship administration solution that could help the Foundation do the same. We evaluated several scholarship management solutions, but we established the best rapport with AwardSpring right away.

Everyone was so accommodating and worked well with us! We had board members who wanted to participate in early calls, and they were always made to feel welcome.

We felt appreciated and respected by AwardSpring from the beginning. That top-notch service is what was most important to us.

This was our first major software implementation, and it went so smoothly. We were thrilled that we could text, call, or email and get a response right away.

The goals and milestones that were laid out before us were achievable and we got everything set up right on schedule. Anytime we saw opportunity for improvement or customizations, our partners at AwardSpring were quick to offer thoughtful solutions.

To this day we always feel heard by their team. Before AwardSpring, we used to spend a lot of time reading through applications, noting everything that was incomplete, and contacting students to get their applications completed.

And we’d have to contact high school counselors to get transcripts. What a hassle!

Now, it’s so easy to log in to AwardSpring and see what still needs to be done, and we can reach out to students through the platform. AwardSpring has saved me a lot of time!

AwardSpring has also made things easier on our student applicants and reviewers. It’s much easier for students to track their progress, pause and come back to their application, and see exactly what they need to do before submitting when it’s all online.

Even our least Internet-savvy reviewers love AwardSpring. Like our applicants, our reviewers love that their progress is automatically saved as they go, so they can pause and step away without fear of losing their work.

We’ve had nothing but rave reviews from them! Really, all of us at Eastern West Virginia Community Foundation are so excited to be under the AwardSpring umbrella now.