As an organization awarding scholarships, you need a scholarship application form that enables you to collect substantial data that you will need for making well-informed decisions.
Here are some factors you may want to consider when drafting your organization’s scholarship form:
What should be in your application form?
Nothing else tops the importance of the content of your application form. Apart from the basics, background information about the student such as extracurricular activities and grades is also worth acquiring.
For heritage and ethnicity-based scholarships, requesting information that pertains to this is imperative.
For special scholarships for sports or fine arts, you may want to require a history of the student’s experience and performance under these fields.
Giving students the opportunity to share what they are passionate about their future plans will also help you assess their depth and potential.
In addition to these, a signature or confirmation of understanding should be collected as well, with the applicant acknowledging that all the information is correct.
Promote your organization with proper branding
Proper branding is vital to any organization. Whether the scholarship is being given by the school, a third party, or directly from your organization, the student will want to know who to address and thank.
Branding not only connects your company to your recipients but also helps build a positive image. By putting your organization’s logo, colors, motto, or another identifying mark on the form, you can ensure your application form stands out from the others.
Whether you use hard copies or collect applications digitally with scholarship management software, your forms should have easily recognizable branding to identify your organization.
Should we go manual or digital?
With many aspects of school and business taking place online now, it can be advantageous for your organization to consider putting your scholarship forms online instead of having applicants print them out and return them.
Receiving applications online allows for easy digital response and reduces the number of paper applications or emails you’ll receive. Hosting your scholarship forms online makes them more convenient and easily accessible to the average applicant, as well as editable.
Managing and handling completed forms efficiently
Free your organization from the strain of managing completed forms in bulky file cabinets, host them digitally in one convenient and intuitive scholarship management platform.
Because it’s important to keep records that relate to your applicants, your final scholarship recipients, and anything else that might be important for your organization to have on file in the future, digital storage and management can help keep everything organized without worrying about storing physical copies of your records.
While there’s no one right way to go about creating a scholarship form, it’s important that your organization covers the basics of data collection from every applicant. Look for a process that will make it easy for applications to apply, and streamline your team’s review process, so that you can quickly and confidently choose your best recipient.
Discover how we can help your organization get the best return on your scholarship application process.
Create a smooth-running process with Scholars United, a platform to help universities, colleges, and corporations manage their entire scholarship application lifecycle in one centralized solution.
Accept Applications
Need to import student data from enrollment systems, financial aid systems, home-grown student databases, or from systems like Banner and PeopleSoft? Scholars United enables these imports and our integration APIs are used to afford students and admins single sign-on using their existing SIS credentials, eliminating the need for multiple usernames and passwords.
Nominate Students
Advisors, high-school guidance counselors, department heads, academic college leaders, and/or community organizations have the flexibility to nominate applicants to receive scholarships.
Flexible Scholarship Matches
With our “One-Click Apply” option, students can apply for all available scholarships in just a few seconds.
Match Applicants To Funds
Scholars United automatically matches all the applicants who qualify. Easily set up a scoring rubric and have the system create a pre-sorted list of applicants based on the highest relevance to the fund’s criteria and find the most qualified applicants.
Unlimited Review Workflows
Whether you have a one-step review process or a 10 step review process the system allows you to create unlimited evaluation steps and links them to evaluation/review rubrics. Add scores to the review rubrics to filter the applicants that have the highest committee review scores.
Online Review
Share funds-specific reports and spending policies with reviewers. Scholarship administrators can access all the reviews using a single administrator dashboard.
Flexible Awards Process
The platform also allows awards to applicants from single or multiple funds. Students to accept or deny the offered award, and you can select your first and second favorite for the award in case your first choice declines. This saves the time and hassle of reevaluating all qualified applicants. Review funding overlaps for applicants with multiple considerations; and to speed up the awards process, the system can perform batch awards.
Renewable Awards
CommunityForce enables you to collect information from the applicant post-award process. Scholarship administrators can create reports that can help them ensure that the applicant continues to comply with the fund requirement year after year.
Report and Analyze
Slice and dice that data however you wish using real-time ad hoc reporting. Create reports to help with data accuracy and ensuring compliance with donor-advised funds requirements. Administrators can generate statistical reports from the system that can be used for annual reports.
Whether you’re a startup organization or a leading corporation, CommunityForce provides fully customizable, all-in-one online scholarship management solutions to maximize your efficiency, simplify complex processes, and improve collaboration so you can focus on increasing your impact. We’ve helped organizations streamline their entire process no matter the size and scope of their giving.
We enable organizations to reduce the amount of time spent on administrative burdens and focus on what matters: increasing their impact.
