By Jaidyn Crookston | October 22, 2024 | 11 Minute Read

How to Make the Scholarship Application Process Easy for Students and Your Institution

Does your financial institution offer scholarships to students in your community? This is a great way to get involved and support the future leaders of our world, and students will appreciate the support you give.

But offering scholarships can be a tricky business. You have to promote it to students, collect applications, choose winners, and distribute funds. Most financial institutions prioritize making this process as easy on the students as possible, and that’s a good thing! But in doing so, you’re likely left with a messy, complicated process for yourself and your team.

If you dread scholarship season, you need a better way to manage your institution’s application process.

Here are some tips for making the scholarship application process easier for students and for your institution.

How to make the application process easy for students

Make sure the correct students know about it

If you want students to submit applications, promoting your scholarship is key. And not only promoting the scholarship, but promoting it to the correct students. If your scholarship is open to graduating high school seniors, then that’s who you need to get in front of. If your scholarship is for young women going into the STEM field, you better make sure those young women know about it. Who your scholarship is for is entirely up to your institution, but promoting it to the wrong audience is a great way to tank your scholarship before it’s even begun.

Here are some ideas on how to promote your scholarship to students:

Visit schools and talk to students
Promote it at community events
Blast it on social media
Hang flyers at the local hang-out spots
Talk to guidance counselors and leave brochures for students
Email customers/members with more information

While you want to reach your specific audience, don’t forget about their parents! Many parents are just as invested in scholarships as their children, and this can be a great way to pass the word and give students a little extra encouragement.

Woman hanging a flyer on a board

Keep it simple

Now that students know about your scholarship, you need to make the application process as simple as possible. Students are busy enough as it is—homework, sports, clubs, hobbies, friends, etc. They can’t spend hours filling out a single scholarship application. The more complicated your application process is, the more likely you are to lose them.

Keeping your application simple means don’t ask a billion questions you don’t need the answers to! Collect everything you need to make an informed decision, but don’t overwhelm them with questions. That’s just asking for an incomplete form.

Here are some common scholarship application questions you might consider:

Name and contact info
School info
GPA and ACT/SAT scores
Tell us about yourself
How will this scholarship help you?
Why do you deserve this scholarship?
What obstacles have you overcome in your life?
What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?
Please provide letters of recommendation

If you have an essay portion, assign topics that are easy to understand and research. Provide clear instructions and don’t ask for anything crazy.

There you have it. No unnecessary info, and no repetitive questions. Start with the most important question first and work your way down from there. Students will thank you.

Make it easy to access and submit

Have you ever been asked to submit an application and had to jump through a bunch of hoops to do so? You click one link and that takes you to another. And then you have to log in to another system, where you have to find the application and finally open it. Only to be met with a bunch of questions you don’t even know the answers to. You’re busy! You don’t have time for this!

This might be how potential applicants feel if your scholarship application is hard to access or submit.

The easier this application is to find and complete, the more applications you’ll see, and the happier students will be.

But how to make your application easy to submit? This starts with how students access the form. Ideally, there should be one link that takes them directly to the application with no strings attached. Many banks and credit unions keep this link on their community involvement webpage. This way, students can find and open it online.

And once your form is easy to access, make it easy to submit. There shouldn’t be a billion questions, the “submit” button should be obvious, and they should receive confirmation that the form went through.

Making your scholarship application easy to find and submit doesn’t have to be difficult. Just think about where you’d naturally go to find scholarship info, and put it there.

Submit button on a keyboard

Follow up with applicants

Once an application is submitted, students wait anxiously to hear whether or not they’ve received a scholarship. They need to plan for college, and locking down finances is one of the most important steps.

That’s why you should always follow up with everyone who applies, whether or not they receive the scholarship.

For those who don’t get the scholarship, make sure to thank them for their time and encourage them to apply again next year if applicable. If you’re up for it, you might even share some things you liked about their application and what they might consider working on in the future. This will help students perform better on other scholarships, and it shows that you truly care about them.

For those who did get the scholarship, congratulations are in order! This is a big accomplishment, and you should share with them some highlights from their application and make it clear that they should be proud. Work directly with the student or their school to distribute funds.

Now your scholarship application process is super easy for students! This is an important time in their lives, and the fact that you’ve taken time to think of them and their needs will come through and win your institution some brownie points. Who knows, maybe they’ll be opening an account with you soon.

Let’s talk about how to make this process easy for your institution, too.

How to make the application process easy for your institution

Keep it simple

Your bank or credit union’s scholarship application process shouldn’t just be simple for students. It should also be simple for you, your team, and your institution. Nothing is more disheartening than seeing hundreds of applications come through (exciting!) and knowing that your entire weekend is now booked (boo!).

Remember how you avoided asking for unnecessary info and repetitive questions? That’s going to come in handy now, since you won’t be wasting time reviewing answers that aren’t important to the decision.

Just like the application should be easy for students to access and submit, those completed forms should be easy for your team to access and review. Don’t make your team members jump through hoops to find the applications, and make sure everything is kept in one place so you aren’t switching back and forth between tabs or systems.

Someone hitting an Easy button

Make sure the correct employees are involved

Who should be involved in reviewing applications and choosing the winners depends on how both your institution and scholarship are set up. Maybe it’s one department managing the whole process. Maybe one department sets it up and then applications are passed on to the board of directors for review. Maybe everyone in the institution reviews applications and votes on the winners.

Nobody can tell you how to manage this part, but you should think carefully about each step in the process and determine who actually needs to be involved. Just like students don’t have time to spend on a complicated application, your coworkers don’t have time to work on something that isn’t ultimately their responsibility.

Many banks and credit unions appoint a scholarship committee to review applications and select winners. This committee can include anyone, but make sure that clear guidelines are set and that nobody is involved who would be better off doing something else to help the institution.

Speaking of clear guidelines…

Establish clear guidelines throughout the process

One of the most challenging parts of running a scholarship program is selecting the winners. You want to help everyone, and deciding who doesn’t receive funds can be a difficult task.

To avoid miscommunication, establish clear guidelines for everyone involved in the scholarship process. From those creating the form to those distributing funds, everyone needs to be on the same page and know exactly what’s expected of them.

To make a fair selection, consider creating a rubric or common grading system to analyze each scholarship application. Remaining impartial is key, and you want to ensure that the selection process is fair and honorable. Train everyone involved on the grading requirements, and make sure to answer any questions before turning your scholarship committee members loose.

Scholarship grading rubric

Use Kadince to collect and review scholarship applications

There are plenty of systems out there to help with your scholarship application collection and review process. But how many of those systems make the process easy for both students and your institution?

Kadince does.

Kadince is community involvement software made specifically for financial institutions. Hundreds of banks and credit unions around the country use Kadince to track and manage volunteer hours, events, donations, sponsorships, grants, and, yes, scholarship applications.

With Kadince, you can:

Receive all scholarship applications through an online form that can be linked on your website/social media pages or sent directly to students
Keep track of all relevant details in one place
Collect and store attachments like recommendation letters and essays
Use workflows to route applications to the proper reviewer(s) for scoring and review
View all comments and reviews for each application
Build reports that show an overview of all scholarship applicants and relevant details (they even update in real-time!)
Send tasks to the accounting department for funds distribution

Ready to manage the full lifecycle of your institution’s scholarship applications in one place? Schedule a 30-minute demo to learn more.

Check out the other articles in this series

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