You Asked For It, We Built It: Why We Enabled Overlapping Cycles

The most requested update of the past few years has been to add the ability to start a new cycle while one is in progress. When we originally built the platform, we made a conscious decision not to enable Overlapping Cycles  in order to keep the experience as simple and straightforward as possible for all users. We find that one of our core responsibilities is to make the complex, nuanced scholarship management process as simple as possible, and we’re all about that. But it’s important to us to listen to our customers and do our best in giving customers what they want when we can find a compelling solution that retains our commitment to simplicity. That’s why we finally released Overlapping Cycles in January 2021, with subtleties that preserve a simple and easy user experience for students and reviewers.

Overlapping Cycles allows you to start a new cycle while your current one is in the review or award stage.  There are two main reasons why we finally built it:

• To give administrators more workflow control. Now you can work on fine-tuning your next cycle while current one is in progress.
• To help administrators accommodate the needs of different schools or divisions that have different award cycle timelines.

Our competitors also have this feature, but our version is more thoughtfully designed for an excellent user experience. We designed Overlapping Cycles so that applicants are never exposed to more than one application period at a time and reviewers are never exposed to more than one review period at a time. This keeps AwardSpring as simple and straightforward as it’s ever been for students and reviewers, who are our most infrequent users, and ensures administrators won’t have to field any new questions from confused applicants and colleagues.

We’re committed to improving our platform to serve your needs better. If you have a feature request, email us at support@awardspring.com – we’d love to hear it!