Enhancing Pupil Communications in Your Scholarship Course of

Speaking with college students is a key a part of the scholarship course of. Whereas it may be time-consuming and sometimes overwhelming, it is usually extremely rewarding to congratulate them on their scholarship awards, gather post-acceptance info and thank-you messages, and share these messages with donors. That’s the coronary heart of each scholarship program—empowering scholar success. 

But in a Blackbaud survey, solely 50% of establishments felt like their communications to college students had been streamlined effectively. At a time when everybody appears to be doing extra with much less, how do you scale back administrative burdens and nonetheless nurture the form of relationships that your college students deserve?

Beneath are just a few recommendations on the way to streamline communication with college students for effectivity and engagement.

Consolidate and modernize determination notifications. 

Many establishments nonetheless depend on e-mail to speak with college students, and in some instances ship a number of emails primarily based on the variety of awards they obtain. For instance, if a scholar is awarded 10 totally different scholarships, they get 10 totally different emails they have to open, learn, and click on to simply accept their awards. 

Gone are the times after we might rely strictly on e-mail to speak with immediately’s college students. We should meet them the place they’re, which is on their cellphone. Texts and push notifications get their consideration extra shortly and they are going to be extra responsive if the textual content connects them with a portal the place they’ll settle for all their awards, full thank-you notes for donors, and different actionable gadgets.

Admins can save time by consolidating messaging to incorporate all of the scholarships and awards every scholar is receiving—fairly than one-by-one notifications—and the scholar has one reference level to view every part concerning their awards.

Trendy award administration software program consolidates all awards in a single system and facilitates communication by enabling each textual content and e-mail.

Use a web-based platform to gather post-acceptance particulars.

Do you at present gather post-acceptance info out of your award recipients? This might embrace thank-you letters to scholarship donors, solutions to a sequence of questions on their expertise at your establishment, or essays in regards to the influence of the scholarships on their lives. All this stuff are useful in relation to stewarding your donors, however making an attempt to wrangle college students to put in writing letters and supply different info in a well timed method will be troublesome. 

Utilizing a web-based platform to gather info not solely makes the method simpler for you, however it additionally encourages your college students to finish the duties on time. College students now not have to stroll throughout campus to ship a hastily-written handwritten thank-you observe or questionnaire. Over 60% of establishments are asking college students to submit this stuff on-line, permitting the scholarship and development directors the power to proofread, edit, and retailer the collected info digitally.* In flip, this makes it simpler to share scholar info along with your donors and deepen their connection to your program.

(*Let’s face it. College students are doing all of it on their telephones, so you have to to proofread and edit every part. The appropriate software program will help.)

Leverage automation in your scholarship administration platform.

Maybe essentially the most important advantages of a top-tier award administration platform are scholarship centralization and the power to automate communication. When all out there awards are centralized, the system can auto-match college students to scholarships and alert them of awards for which they could be eligible. College students can apply for all awards with one login and one frequent software.

After committee critiques—which the system facilitates—the scholarship administrator can activate e-mail and textual content messaging to let every scholar know what awards they obtained and what their subsequent steps are. They’ll additionally automate reminders and different notifications, then college students use the identical login they used for purposes to simply accept awards and submit mandatory info.

Streamline communications for effectivity and engagement.

Consolidating communications, updating the means with which you talk, and strategically automating notifications can take a serious quantity of labor off scholarship directors, liberating up your time for different vital duties as you progress by means of the season. 

Interested by different methods to streamline your scholarship administration course of? Try extra posts on our larger training weblog and our useful resource heart.