Running a successful Awards or Scholarship programme involves much more than just processing the applications.
1. Sponsorship
Sponsors, funders and philanthropists are essential to run any awards programme. Sponsors can range from central government to individual contributions from members of the public.
You should maintain a database of all your sponsors, past, current and potential. What is their area of interest, how much do they normally contribute, what type of information do they wish to receive from you.
Sponsors shouldn’t be taken for granted. You should communicate with them on a regular basis, not just when you are seeking the next years sponsorship.
2. Promotion & Marketing
If your organisation provides scholarships, awards or grants then you have a great story to tell.
The stories of the successful awardees. The difference or impact made as a result of the funding you provided. It is often the individual case study of one successful awardee rather than grant figures and statistics that make the biggest impact.
Part of your procedure should involve recording this feedback.
Promotion & Marketing can be done through newsletters, social media, trade shows, through academic institutions and at industry events.
3. Online Registration
In addition to marketing your Awards or Grants, you need to make it easy for prospective applicants to engage with you. This is usually before they make a formal application. There are two advantages.
One, it can help to automatically filter out applicants who are not eligible for your Award or Scholarship. A simple example – if your award is only available to people living in America then you make the list of US states mandatory.
Two, it gives you the opportunity to engage with the applicants so you can advise them in relation to their application, gauge the interest in your programme and remind them about any deadlines.
4. The Application Process
The application process is one of the most important stages and the design of the application form is key.
The overriding principal is to request the information that you and your evaluation team would need to assess, evaluate and differentiate the applications. Decide which fields they select from a dropdown list, which are text fields and how much text do you allow in such fields.
A well-designed online application form gives you much greater control than a paper based one. You can restrict what applicants can fill in. You can set deadlines for when the application is open. You can limit the amount of text for individual fields. If you have an integrated system, then the applicants are updating the system, directly removing any need to transcribe or copy applications.
You also need to bear in mind the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and your own GDPR policy.
5. Review of Applications
You need to have a robust, trusted and transparent system in place for review of your applications. You need to have reviewers or an evaluation committee who are competent to evaluate in the field of expertise that you are funding.
Your review system should be transparent with a full audit trail running throughout. Nowadays, applicants, particularly unsuccessful ones, are more likely to query your decisions.
An online review system is preferable. This gives a number of advantages.
It saves having to copy and send applications to reviewers, thus minimising data privacy risks with confidential data being copied around.
With a key scoring system, you can ensure the evaluation is more standard and less open to bias.
You save considerable time as you are sharing the application and any supporting documentation with reviewers with the minimum of administration.
6. The Interview
Some organisations interview the shortlisted applicants to help make a final decision on the award or scholarship.
Like the reviews, if you interview candidates, your system should be transparent with a full audit trail running throughout.
The interview is the final step before recommendation and approval so the information should be presented in a clear manner for the interviewers – the application and the recommendation from the reviews or evaluation stage.
If your interviewers are comfortable entering their scores into your system after each interview, then they should be able to generate a quick view of the highest ranked applicants throughout the day of the interviews.
7. Payment Processing
The payment of the grant in full or in instalments is the final step in the processing of the grant or award.
You should put in place a system that you and your auditors are happy with. You should cater for the scheduling of future payments, the claiming by the successful applicants and the making of the payments.
The system should have an audit trail so that all entries and changes should be recorded and date & time stamped.
You should have a reporting system in place that lets you report on past and scheduled payments.
8. Reporting & Impact Analysis
You should set procedures for recording the outcomes or impacts achieved by the people and organisations that you support through awards, scholarships or grants.
You should be easily able to report on applications and awards. Here are some reports that you should be able to generate
- How many enquiries did we receive
- How many applications received
- How much sponsorship was committed and how much received
- How many reviews and interviews
- How many successful interviews
- How much has been awarded
- How much is awarded and not yet paid out
- How much do we have to pay out in the next month for example
- The status of all current applications
- Analysis by type of grant or different scheme
- Analysis by location
- Analysis by date ranges. Compare different years.
- What is the impact of a particular sponsorship
- What is the overall impact of a scheme or award
You should be able to generate ad-hoc reports to provide the information you require for your stakeholders – Management, Board, Sponsors & Funders, Accountants and Auditors etc.
9. Alumni Management
Many international scholarships are provided for further studies. Some are in similar academic fields of study and some different.
After years of processing scholarships, where you may have recorded the field of study, the institutions and faculties being attended, the locations of the awardees, you have a significant amount of information that could be used to achieve an even greater impact.
With the agreement of your clients that you have funded you have the opportunity to build an Alumni system to leverage the impact
This could take different formats depending on what you wish to achieve
- Maintain a live database by allowing your Alumni to update their own records such as contact details, current employer, location or education for example.
- Ongoing communication with your Alumni of people you have funded
- Invitations to events of interest to your Alumni
- Building clusters within the Alumni in particular academic fields
- Collaboration between the Alumni whether it is online, in specific countries, in particular fields of study.
- Network building and maintenance
10. System to bring it all together
Discussing the many steps and processes above I refer on many occasions to a system.
A system can range from a well defined paper based set of procedures to an integrated client database that manages you Applications, Processing, Payments, Alumni and CRM.
Nowadays organisations managing awards, scholarships and grants will generally have some computer-based system to help manage their processes.
Here are a few key recommendations in selecting a system:
- Be clear about your own processes before you computerise them. Some computer system vendors will make you adapt your processes to their system rather than the other way around.
- Try to eliminate duplication as much as possible. Don’t have a different database for applicants, for grantees, for alumni, for marketing, for sponsors. That could result in the one person being in 5 different databases or spreadsheets.
- Ensure that your system has a comprehensive audit trail so that you can confidently stand over all the data in your system for any enquiries from auditors or from applicants.
