Managing Scholarships and Awards in a Digital Age: How to Improve the Student and

Administrator Experience

Managing Scholarships & Awards in a Digital Age

How to Improve the Student & Administrator Experience

Overview• Scholarship management in

the Digital Age• Common issues • Best practices• UofO case study

Presenter

Sean ClancyProject Manager & Implementation SpecialistFluidReview

Presenter

Shannon McCluskeyMarketing SpecialistFluidReview

If you’ve never heard of FluidReview, we were an Ottawa-based start-up, founded in 2007. A year and a half ago, we were acquired by SurveyMonkey.

FluidReview is an online solution that helps academic institutions effectively manage scholarship, grant and awards programs online.

Who do we work with?Academic Institutions • Community Foundations • Not For Profits • For

Profits

What’s the Digital Age?

✓ Pervasiveness of technology✓ Accessibility of digital solutions✓ Personalized experience✓ Lower costs✓ Data-lead decision making✓ Digital labour ✓ Ease-of-use

How has it changed how you help students get funding?

Find & apply to scholarships

Expected to be intuitive

Personalized experience

What are common scholarship management issues?

of students have difficulty finding scholarships that they are eligible for.81

%We used SurveyMonkey to run a survey with 500 students at post secondary institutions who applied for scholarships. These were a few of the statistics.

of students find it difficult, or somewhat difficult, to apply for scholarships at their institution.

73%

of students applying for scholarships have abandoned applications due to overly complex requirements and processes.

50%

○ Find the application process unclear

○ Miss important deadlines

○ Can’t find awards

!? ○ Apply to the wrong awards

○ Don’t get the funding they deserve

○ Left in the dark

Universities who haven’t upgraded their scholarship management process to reflect not only new technologies but new expectations, risk having students who….

○ Poor student experience

○ Complex reporting

○ Under-utilized funds

○ Redundancies

○ Decentralization

○ Paper trail

○ Inefficiencies at every step

○ Declining applications

And, the student’s experience with the application process is just the result of even more headaches and pains at the administrative level.

What strategies can bring scholarship management into

the Digital Age?

Improve the student

experience

Centralize & simplify

processes

Improve fund utilization

Strategies are threefold. Each are equally important.

Improve the Student Experience● Student portal● Scholarship matching● Timely communications● Transparency ● Share tasks

Here’s a student portal. You can see they have clear direction to start their first task: completing a common profile.

The profile form has branching to hide and show relevant questions to the student.

The questions in the form helped to qualify the student for awards she is eligible for. The student portal houses the awards and makes it easy to apply.

After clicking on an award, the student can see the tasks specific to that award, and isn’t able to submit the application until it is complete.

The student may complete a resume task. This task can be shared with other awards so the student only needs to complete it once.

Now that she is finished the tasks, she may submit her application.

The student can clearly see the status of her application. And can start a new application by pressing the View Scholarships button.

Centralize & Simplify Processes● Integrate with SIS● Centralize forms & tasks● Automate workflow● Schedule communications● Streamline processes

In FluidReview, admins can easily manage all of their scholarships in one place. Keep track of open and close dates. And manage the workflow.

Here is a workflow for an award. The stages are clearly listed with tasks in each stage.

Improve Fund Utilization● Specify eligibility● Real-time utilization ● Auto-apply students● Ensure compliance

Say an admin noticies that an award has no submitted applications, and the deadline is approaching. What can he do?

By clicking into an award, he can review it’s eligibility criteria, that was easily set up with branching logic.

At the “Who is Eligible” tab, the admin can view all the students on file who are eligible for that award. The admin can then automatically apply them to the award.

University of Ottawa case study

Results221% completed application volume

300% number of students who applied99.99% number of documents processed

manually

Two years ago, the University of Ottawa implemented FluidReview to replace their paper-based process. These were the results.

Solution

+ + +Software Process Institutional

readinessChange

The solution was more than just our software. It was also our process, the institutional readiness for change, and management of the change in process.

Key Takeaways• The Digital Age is leaving universities

& students behind• Universities who embrace the Digital

Age gain an advantage• The solution: centralized scholarship

management solution

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Administrator ExperienceThank you