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Coffee Talk: Cybersecurity-Staying Safe Online
During Cybersecurity Awareness month, we discussed how to protect sensitive data and maintain security protocols in a quickly changing environment. We hope you will join this discussion and share what your organization is doing to prevent security threats.
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College Majors in Eligibility Rules
For those who use a Universal Application for scholarships, if you use a dropdown menu listing college majors to determine students' eligibility for certain scholarships, would you be willing to please share the dropdown list of majors you list?
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Scholarship Applications Following Natural Disaster
The Foundation that I consult with is in Henderson County NC. It's sole mission is to support the public schools in the county. There are so many unknowns right now. I work remotely several states away so one of the things I can do now is to try to figure out how we can support our high seniors. Does anyone have experience…
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Demographic questions in scholarship application?
Hi everyone, Do you ask demographic questions as part of your scholarship application? We have not included a demographic section, but starting next year, we plan to add optional questions at the beginning of the application to better understand who is applying and receiving our scholarships. Initially, I planned to use…
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SAT Scores for Scholarships
Good Morning, I am curious how many of you require SAT Scores on your applications for scholarships vs do not require it on your application. Last year we had it as optional, but are trying to determine if we should make it required or not. If you have it optional, how do you factor it into the scoring? Does the…
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Coffee Talk: Funding Displacement and Scholarship Awarding Process
Thank you to everyone who joined us today to talk all things scholarships and the awards process! Below are some other resources on scholarship displacement that you can take a look at! Use this space to continue the discussion!
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Financial Need vs. Ability to Use a scholarship
Hello, There is much discussion about financial need of a student. We evaluate a student based on a number of input items from the student such as SAI, income, extenuating family circumstances. What I do not see being considered is the ability to use a scholarship. Does anyone determine the amount the student owes - SAI?…
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Navigating Colleges Payments Post Award
Hello everyone, We often get students (or their parents) coming to us to ask what's happening with their scholarships once it has been to sent to a particular school. While I don't mind following up with the school to ensure the funding was received, I often feel like I am being asked to navigate each school's method from…
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Automatic address correction?
So apparently our student scholarship applicants don't know where they live. Is it a street, a road, a boulevard? And nevermind about pesky capitalization. ZIP code? Oh boy! :) Anyone else with SLM suffer through this and know if Foundant has consider that auto address correct function you see elsewhere on the internet,…
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Scholarship Grant Press Release
Do any of your community foundation's do a post-scholarship grant award press release? If so, what kind of information do you share and more importantly does it get published? 😂 Any examples are appreciated!
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Scholarship Thank You
We require the students to write their "thank you to the donors" on the follow-up form when they claim their scholarship. If they received more than one scholarship, they write one thank you. I attach the letter and email it to the donors/fund advisors. I'm curious on how others handle thank you letters. This is our second…
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Scholarship Funding Displacement
We'd love to hear from you, the experts, about your experience with funding displacement. If you have dealt with this issue, how have you addressed it? How did you know this has happened? Have you adjusted your communication with the school to prevent this from occurring? Thank you for taking the time to provide your…
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AI Generated Responses from Applicants
My organization uses Foundant for Grant, Scholarship, and Assistantship applications. We recently received two applications that were generated by AI (ChatGPT). The prompt to the essay was copied, pasted, and entered into ChatGPT and the response generated was submitted directly to the scholarship application as the…
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Scholarships -- Determining Financial Need
Hey everyone! I am building our application with Foundant and using this as an opportunity to re-think some of the questions on our application. Several of our scholarships are based on financial need. Currently, I ask students to list their estimated college expenses, scholarships they have for the upcoming year, and…
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FAFSA Challenges - What did you do?! Coffee Talk
We had a great live Coffee Talk about FAFSA at the Foundant Summit Conference. Here are some comments from the participants, grouped by theme. Please add thoughts & ideas of your own - We can revisit this next year when we do it all again! FAFSA CHAOS: WHAT DID YOU DO?! We bailed on the whole FAFSA thing and instead went…
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ACH Scholarship payments
Hello All, We've moved our grant payments to ACH, and now we're working on using ACH for scholarship payments. In the past, we mailed a check for each student award along with a cover letter. Sometimes that meant sending 10 or more checks and letters in one envelope to the school. For those of you currently using ACH for…
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Scholarships are in, now what
I'm looking for best practices or procedure list of how to process scholarships through SLM before sending apps to evaluators/selection committees. Do you review them and abandon ones that clearly don't qualify, etc. and then mark the app complete, etc? Would appreciate your insights or any shared docs of procedures.…
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Out of Country Scholarships
Hello! Does your Foundation have a policy for scholarships when the University is out of the country? For example, a US student, that meets all of the requirements of the scholarship, but the University they are planning to attend is located in a different country. (Note: This is not a Study Abroad program). How do you…
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District Wide Common Scholarship Application Software
Hello! Has anyone successfully partnered with other scholarship providers in their area to put application processes from different organizations onto the same software? The vision is a scholarship software solution for the entire school district so there is just one place that students go to fill out scholarship…
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Reverse Scholarship Program
Good morning, If you are running a reverse scholarship program, I have questions for you! Are you storing applicants social security numbers in SLM? Have you converted any existing scholarship funds to fund a reverse scholarship? Thank you,
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Class rank as part of evaluation process
One of our local school districts will be eliminating class rank as part of their student data, and their guidance office reached out to me for some input. We don't use class rank as part of our scholarship evaluation, but I know other organizations may, so I told her I would reach out to other scholarship providers. Their…
