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 applications (and one place that teachers have to submit recommendations). We are a local Community Foundation, and this idea was mentioned to us by our local Schools Foundation. I know partnering is a lot of work, but the benefit to our students of a single place to apply is exciting. I would love to speak with anyone else who has explored something like this.
Thank you!
Alexandra
Comments
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We "kind of" do that. Once the word got out that we had SLM and students and parents found out how easy it was to use, we had providers moving their scholarships to our foundation. Even if the provider did not want to start a fund with us, they could still use our system by setting up a pass through scholarship where they would send us the money for the scholarship when it was time for it to be paid. There's a fee. We do not allow others to become administrators. Everything is handled in our office by our staff.
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Hello Alexandra,
Our Community Foundation has set up what we call the Community Education Awards Hub that does exactly what you describe. We have reached out to local grassroots groups who do not have the capacity to invest in software such as SLM and invite them to list their application in the Hub.
We launched our Hub in the fall of 2019, on the eve of the pandemic, so we had buy in from the students and our community partners immediately. There are challenges though. Many of these grassroots groups are run by seniors who are very tentative about learning the software and have a hard time grasping why SLM doesn't function exactly like the magical MS Word doc they have been using for decades. So each and every year we have to train the next crop of volunteers on how to use the system. Now in our fourth year, we've had several fundholders set up their own applications so we're now at a point where we have external and internal partners. All partners are set up as Evaluators only so that they only have access to applications submitted for their awards.
We do not charge any partners to list their application. Our only rule is that any application listed accepts submissions from students in the community we represent.
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