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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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Ending grantee relationships, shifting strategies
Hi folks, I'm looking to connect with other community foundation colleagues who have undergone strategy shifts that made significant changes to grant processes (e.g., decreased grant amounts, sunsetting previous grantee relationships that no longer are strategy aligned). We are shifting discretionary resources to…
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CF - legality of paying a scholarship award to a student's student loan
We have a few funds that award scholarships to the contestants in a pageant or rodeo. These recipients may be older and already have earned degrees or are committing to a one-year reign so are not able to attend college the next school year. Do you pay scholarship awards directly to a student loan? As a Community…
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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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How to gather updates on awardees for donor stewardship
Hello! As part of our donor stewardship strategy, we use follow-up forms to gather information from awardees. We then use templates to create a summary page that we can share with our donors using the details shared on the follow-ups. However, we have been having issues with the information that the templates pull, so we…
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Grant Application Scoring Rubric
Hi everyone, Just curious to know how you all score your grant applications. We have specific questions on our application that are worth up to a certain number of points and displayed on the application for applicants to see the weight of that question. The Board then scores the responses to get a total score for an…
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Capital Campaign Grants
Our CF has typically not considered grant requests from nonprofits for capital campaigns for a couple of reasons, one being lack of unrestricted dollars to make such significant grants. Over the years, our unrestricted pot of grantmaking money has grown and recently we recently considered and awarded a large grant…
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Is your Foundation using a Letter of Intent to screen grant applicants? If yes, how?
Hello! I am the new Community Investment Officer at the Hamilton Community Foundation. We are considering using a Letter of Intent in our grant application. Does your Foundation use a Letter of Intent, and if yes, how are you using it? Can anyone provide their question list? Does the Letter of Intent streamline the…
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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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Training Materials for executive Level Support Personnel
Greetings! I am working with our power users on materials that we want to develop for training of our executive-level leadership team members whom we want to engage on the key aspects on how to use and even run our donor-driven grant program via Foundant. Do you have any step-by-step materials that are easy to consume and…
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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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How does your Foundation assess Final Reports from nonprofit and government agency grantees?
Hello! I am the new Community Investment Officer at the Hamilton Community Foundation. I'm curious how other foundations evaluate Final Reports from nonprofit and government agency grantees? We currently ask for the following: Project Goals and Anticipated Outcomes, Attainment of Goals and Lessons Learned, and Measurement…
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Categorizing Grants
I'm trying to figure out an effective method to tag grants within my various processes (both ongoing and past) so that I can categorize them based off of the social issues targeted. One idea I have is using the reporting feature to filter out certain grants but I wonder if I can achieve a tagging outside of this feature I…
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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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Unique Workflows with an Advanced GLM license
Follow up thread from GLM/SLM Expert Webinar | Unique Workflows with an Advanced License.
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Artificial Intelligence - Examples of Grant Agreement contract provisions
Are funders including clauses in their grant agreements regarding grantees use of artificial intelligence in their grant-related work, data collection/analysis, etc.?
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Writable PDF of Grant Application
We've had a few grant applicants requesting a writable pdf of our grant applications. They prefer answering grant questions in a separate document and save before copying and pasting answers into the actual application. GLM has a "questions list" that can be downloaded/printed and the apply page has a preview of our…
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All things Trust Based Philanthropy Discussion
Big thank you to all of those that joined me and @RikkaHoliday for our Coffee Talk this morning about Trust-Based Philanthropy. Bringing the conversation here to hopefully keep things going! Below are the resources shared on our talk. Feel free to use this thread or start a new thread with any of your lingering questions…
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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…
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Note keeping across staff
Hi - I searched but couldn't find this thread already. We have several staff out in the community having conversations with orgs, performing site visits, etc and want to establish a good way of sharing that information across the team. How do other CFs track notes and takeaways from meetings with nonprofit orgs and other…
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Submitted GPA vs. GPA on the transcript
Hello scholarship administrators. We are struggling with the GPA inputted by students vs. the unweighted GPA on the transcript. Although we specifically ask students to input their unweighted GPA as it reads on their transcript, we have found that often it's not a the same as what's on the transcript...which we discover…
