Thomas Edison State University is a unique public New Jersey institution, built to serve adult students with families and jobs. To better accommodate our students’ busy lives, we have a 12-term year with classes starting every month.

As a result, scholarship administration is more complex than at a typical school. Our old scholarship administration methods only made this complexity worse for our large program.

Everything was done in an Excel spreadsheet, which was not robust or sophisticated in any way. We printed lots of paper, held in-person meetings, and sent many emails back and forth to try to manage all the details.

It took up a lot of time and effort! Eventually, our scholarship offerings grew faster than we could keep up, and we knew we needed a solution that would help us consolidate our efforts, track progress, and report accurately, none of which we could do with our paper process.

We knew that an online solution was the answer, so we explored several options. Some solutions were too expensive and included features we’d never use.

We weren’t looking for a single solution that tracked everything; we just needed to manage our scholarship program. In the end, AwardSpring offered the features and service we needed at the right price.

We refined our AwardSpring platform to make it work for our school’s unique circumstances. I can always rely on AwardSpring’s excellent support team to answer questions, resolve problems, or help us improve our site.

When I call or email, I get help right away. And there’s consistency among the staff, which means that the support team knows us, our school, and our needs.

I love that I can pick up the phone, speak to someone I know, and get my question or issue resolved quickly. There are three main benefits we’ve realized by using AwardSpring.

First, just having an easy-to-use online scholarship application shows our students and applicants that we are serious about our scholarships and helping them complete their degrees. It really says something about our institution!

Second, AwardSpring helps us steward our donors. We can track scholarship recipients and reach out to both donors and potential donors with compelling, data-driven scholarship stories that make it easier to secure more funds.

And finally, as student recruitment and retention have become more important to us, AwardSpring helps us measure progress toward our goals. Now we can establish scholarships specifically for recruitment, track recipient retention, and use data to show how scholarships impact our students.

None of this was possible before AwardSpring; it was just too much to manage. We recommend AwardSpring thanks to the quality of their customer support and the data and reporting they provide!