If you do some quick research, then you’ll find that one of the most popular searches by students worldwide are about scholarship applications. Every year, thousands of students go to universities, both in their home countries and aboard. Regardless of the location of the university, their interest in scholarships remain the same. And it is justified because any amount of money is a great help to them.
Post-secondary schools provide scholarships to deserving students every year. These are highly competitive and many students apply for each of these scholarships. Some scholarships are so competitive that even a couple of thousands of students compete against each other to secure one award. In many cases, a scholarship can change a student’s life. Hence, schools try their best to review scholarship applications with the utmost care and get back to students as soon as possible with an application update.
Providing students with feedback is quite important because the sooner they know their application result, the sooner they can plan for their future. The core issue with universities, despite their compassion and interest to do swift follow-ups, is that they do not have enough time and resources to review applications quickly. Particularly, if they are using a manual application management process, reviewing applications become a big deal. On top of that, if they want to send personalized feedback to students when their applications progress through the review cycle, it will take even more time and resources.
Imagine only having a limited number of staff trying to process thousands of applications within a few days! Nightmarish, isn’t it?
Therefore, universities should be adopting a digital, automated scholarship application management solution that leverages modern digital engagement technologies. Using one such solution, schools can accept application from students faster and more easily, store all applications in a centralized database, provide confirmation to students about their application submission automatically, and finally, automatically notify students about the final result.
Here, in this blog, we have discussed our top three benefits of using an automated scholarship application solution for universities:
Benefit 1: Easy Submission Process
It is the 21st century, and still many schools are using a manual process to collect scholarship applications. Some schools even ask students to download a PDF application online, fill it out, and send a hardcopy to the school. This process is certainly volatile and does not guarantee that a scholarship application is submitted properly. On top of that, this process is not user-friendly at all so many students refrain from applying although they need the financial assistance. Using an automated solution, schools can set up a scholarship application form online using a digital form tool. They can include all the required fields to obtain information from students, add textboxes if they are asking for qualitative data like essays, and provide options to upload documents. In this way, students can submit applications faster.
Also, once they submit their applications, each of the applicants will get a personalized submission confirmation message so they can sleep peacefully knowing that their application reached where it is supposed to be.
Benefit 2: Automated Vetting
This is a unique yet essential benefit for staff if they are reviewing applications with specific criteria. Imagine, you have only few staff on your team and you have to review a thousand of applications, among which many will be rejected because they do not meet specific criteria such as GPA, years of professional experience, field of study, etc. You can set up the form in a way that if the minimum set of criteria is not met, the automated solution will reject the application and send a rejection letter to the applicant who submitted it. In this way, non-eligible students are already omitted from the list, making the lives of the financial aid department staff easy.
Benefit 3: Collaborative Review
When a student submits an application via the online scholarship application form, the student's profile along with all other information is stored in a centralized database. Also, the scholarship application will be entered into a review cycle automatically.
In this way, all staff can review applications collaboratively. Also, since all applications are going through a review cycle, after someone completes their part of review, they can simply place the application in the next phase for another staff member to review. Every time a staff member gets to review an application for a particular phase, a task will be created for them to complete.
If the school wants, they can also notify students as their application progresses.
So, here are our top three benefits of using an automated scholarship application management solution for your school. If you find these interesting, there is good news for you: SimplyCast has already built this solution that is 100 percent ready to go and fully customizable to fit your school’s scholarship application review policy.
SimplyCast is an all-in-one digital engagement solution provider. The company is ISO 27001 certified with datacenters in the USA and Canada. We are also a hyper-scalable solution provider which means, you can manage hundreds of thousands of scholarship applications at once while keeping your and your students’ data secured.
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