Scholarship Evaluation Committee Best Practices

AlyseBraaten

I've heard several clients ask some great questions about scholarship evaluation committees over the past few weeks. I'll note my understanding of the Best Practice below, but I welcome other opinions and discussion.

1. Committee Composition for Donor Funded Scholarships: Is it ok for a donor to be the only person selecting scholarship recipients from their fund? - I believe the answer here is no. The committee needs to include a majority non-family of the donor. This relates to some IRS regulations, but I'm no attorney, so I'll refrain from trying to be more specific.
2. How many people should be reviewing each application?- The Best Practice is 2-3, though it can definitely be more. Without doing a lot of training and score norming exercises with your evaluators, it's not generally a good idea to have only one reviewer per applicant. This is because reviewers bring their own expectations and biases to their reviews. You want at least two sets of scores for the student so that those scores can be averaged. Ideally, you also wouldn't want the same teams of 2 evaluating large groups of students together for the same reason.

I'm sure there are more questions and answers on this topic. Let's open up the discussion together!

AlyseBraaten

@JulieChristman @TiffanyMcQueen @sarahcopeland

LaurieAbildso

Regarding #1, yes, the donor and parties related to the donor must comprise a minority of the committee for scholarships administered by charitable organizations. This stems from the Pension Protection Act of 2006.

Our committees generally have 3-5 members. In rare cases, we have 7 (for example, if we have 3 donor representatives, we must have 4 community members unrelated to the donors). When we set up new scholarship funds, we encourage one donor representative and two community volunteers. Three seems to be a good, manageable number for scholarship committees.

We also let our committee members know that they must alert us if they are related to any of the applicants they are reviewing. In those cases, they sit out that year, and we appoint a back-up to replace them on the committee.

I'd love to hear other best practices!

AlyseBraaten

@LaurieAbildso

I have a quick follow-up question Laurie. In your committees of 3-4. Does every member review every application or do they divide them up among the members? How many will end up actually reviewing each application?

LaurieAbildso

Great question, @AlyseBraaten! For all of our current committees, members currently review every application. We have a couple of opportunities we are considering dividing among members to ease the review burden, but we have not done that yet. I'd love to learn best practices from others who have divided applications among committee members.

AudraClodfelter

@AlyseBraaten Do you know of any SLM users who divide an opportunity-group (I have no idea what else to call them LOL) of applicants into multiple groups for review? Like @LaurieAbildso, I'm considering this practice for a few opportunities that receive a high volume of applications. I can't decide if I want to move forward or not. I was thinking about doing a random division into two equal groups (or, equal-ish, if it's an odd number of applicants) and assigning them to three reviewers/group. I don't know what's holding me back, so any advice would be appreciated!

AlyseBraaten

Great question @AudraClodfelter! I used this workflow myself for several years prior to the invention of Universal Application and review committees. The "committee" created and set in your Universe can be thought of as the list of possible reviewers for that scholarship. You don't have to assign any request to all members of that committee.

I regularly assigned students in batches to 2-3 committee members for review. I knew my reviewers really well and tried my best to set up reviewer groups (or mini committees) to ensure fair and balanced evaluation of students. If you don't know your reviewers very well, I would lean towards having 3 reviewers minimum in each group and just ensure they aren't all members of the same family, teachers at the same school, or had some other unintended commonality.

As you assign evaluators, you'll see the count of how many requests they have been assigned. This can be really helpful to ensure that the volume stays balanced and can help with redistribution if you have a reviewer that decided at the last minute to participate in the process.

This is not an abnormal workflow and can be a great strategy to help combat the reviewer fatigue that can affect scoring when a person or committee have exceedingly long lists of student applications to read and score.

AudraClodfelter

Thanks, @AlyseBraaten! I think I will use this with my upcoming evaluations!!

LizMcClure

@AudraClodfelter @LaurieAbildso Our review committee for our financial need based scholarships usually has 6-8 folks on it, when we review we split the main committee into two subcommittees - one to review high school applicants and one to review college applicants. Back before the time of UA we always thought of our financial need scholarships as one pool of money since they have the same eligibility criteria which are different from our merit based scholarships, so we split the funds available in half and each subcommittee awards their funds independent of the other subcommittee. It has worked really well for us! Our evaluators struggled with how to compare a high school senior to a college junior so now it's more of an apples to apples comparison for them as they work through the applications. In SLM, I've only sent 1 of their 6 financial need applications to the evaluators so they aren't spending time looking at more than 1 application for a student. I hope that makes sense!

elizabethmesserli

This is a great discussion thread! We also usually have reviewer committees of 3 people. We have a few scholarships where the donors have requested more than one of their family members be involved and like others, in that case we just have to have at ladsts 51% be community volunteers with no involvement with that fund.

Another best practices question - how does your organization handle it if there is only one truly qualified candidate for a scholarship? Do you deem that student the awardee automatically? Do you still ask reviewers to score their application?

Thank you!

Elizabeth

ELIZABETH MESSERLI

Donor Services Manager

Community Foundation of Northern Colorado

LaurieAbildso

Hi @elizabethmesserli! We do have reviewers rate the applicant even if there is just one, but I'm curious to hear what others do!

MichelleFrederickson

If we have only one applicant that qualifies we awarded the monies to that applicant. We also verify that every part of the criteria is met before that determination is made.

ErinStarnes

We have recently had an interest from community organizations to manage their scholarship process (Kiwanis, garden clubs, etc.). Are there any other community foundations that manage processes for this type of organization? This may be a silly question, but do you relinquish all aspects of the review/selection process to the members, or do you require that 51% of the committee be non-members? Do you look at it differently if they are paid members vs. volunteers? Based on your experience, what feedback or suggestions would you share?

HaileyCarmerLaMaster

Any scholarships applied for via SLM are funds we house at our Foundation. Our scholarship policy dictates that the fund rep/fund advisors may be one of the three votes/evaluations for each application. So if three siblings want to review, that is fine, but they only get to complete one evaluation as a committee. We house a few independently administered scholarship applications on our website as a free service to our community (we no longer offer this as an option and are pushing to eliminate the ones we have). These scholarships do not abide by our scholarship policy, and we make that clear on our website and when we talk about them at senior financial aid nights. We do not run these applications through SLM, and they are typable PDFs that they submit independently to the organizations themselves.

JenniferBrambley

I have a question about best practices for need-based scholarships. We have run into applicants who have been accepted at multiple schools, some more expensive than others. There have been instances in the past where they were awarded a scholarship and decided to go to a less expensive school. If we had known that information from the start, they may not have been awarded a scholarship due to their EFC on the FAFSA. Of course this doesn't always happen so is it something we should be concerned with for future scholarships?

TIA!

Jennifer Brambley

Peninsula Community Foundation of VA