Scholarship Tracking

Born: Sept 22, 2022

Overview

There is a need for students to be able to easily connect to scholarships and grants that meet their qualifying criteria. The ultimate goal is to have a place where students can complete a form and can have instant access to view the grants and scholarships available to them and where foundations, schools and companies can offer, view and track scholarships and grants they are offering. This would be a great resource.

Value statement 

Free and resource based search engine that doesn’t put up ads. Unbiased and inclusive with no pay wall.

Blueprint

  • Students being able to find all scholarships in one area.  
  • Like Indeed or linkedin for students.
  • Match students with relevant scholarships based on their background info.
  • v1.0 - One place to search and track what is available.

Grand Vision

Students are able to research, track and apply through a one stop shop. Universities and scholarship makers/givers are incentivized to post scholarship opportunities on this portal for students to find.

  • Students should be able to fill out their contact form, and easily apply, in bulk, to all the scholarships that apply to them at once.
  • From there, this is where the portal can help visually track the progress of each application.

Phases

Phase 1

For scholarship seekers: A central & digitized place to organize your application efforts vs the spreadsheet or paper system you’re currently using. Create a basic profile, keep track of your applications, and create a report / share your progress with your counselors.

Phase 2

Get scholarship creators to input their offerings on a standardized form. Scholarship seekers are able to quickly do an “apples-to-apples” comparison of scholarships, bookmark them, and connect with the creators with questions.

Phase 3

Scholarship seekers are able to search, track and apply directly from this one-stop shop. Scholarship creators accept the format/can choose their own format of the applications.

Usability

All scholarship listings and grants need to be standardized so that students quickly see:

  • Prerequisites
  • Amounts
  • Length of availability
  • Special considerations
  • Any school/universities the scholarships are limited to.

This is so that students can quickly do an apples to apples comparison between several opportunities without having to reformat it themselves, as they currently do in a spreadsheet.

Technology

  • Experience Cloud to see the results
  • Slack to create a workspace for students to collaborate and learn from each other.
  • OCR to parse out uploaded generic student applications and pass values into the database.

Marketing Messaging

  • University benefits
  • Filling quotas, students are able to see they can afford this
  • Prove to them that there are eyeballs on this site, and if you want people to look at you, this is where you need to post.

Requirements

  • Prompting students to update proof of GPA every semester or quarter
  • Unique login credentials so that students can view and save their own records.
  • Student financial tracker/planner to track how much their goal was, how much they actually got.
  • Can AI help find the shortage amount?
  • Can we set up reminders of how much money is about to expire / when to renew?
  • Is there an ability for parents/other adults to be able to be granted access to help students fill out / advise students?
  • story: Students are overwhelmed by the paperwork and terminology and need advice?.
  • Can volunteer advisors meet the students in slack and video huddle to see the section the student is stuck on?  

Research

  • Are any other sites doing this already? Maybe for individual groups?
  • What can we learn from them? What can we make better?
  • Does FAFSA (and other scholarship aggregators/providers) have an API that we can tap into?
  • What does the FAFSA application require when filling out?
  • Should this be the basis of a starting point, where everyone fills this out first?
  • Who will ultimately own this product? Is it part of a Salesforce product team or does the Commons own it?
  • Which nonprofit / organization could this roll into that has a big trust factor?
  • Could this be a foundation?
  • How do we match criteria?
  • What laws apply to discriminatory decisions?

Next Steps

  • Create the student personas, stakeholder personas, scholarship provider persona.
  • Who are the scholarship providers?  Providers who want to make their scholarships generally available and searchable.  
  • How might we improve what students are searching for?
  • Why do the current search engines suck?
  • Where is the gap?
  • Look at the road map

Personas

Students

  • As a student, I would like to fill out an application that I can use for multiple scholarships.  
  • As a senior high school student with a certain GPA, I want to fill out an application that I can use for multiple scholarships at multiple schools.
  • As a two year returning student, I had a job but now I am looking for a scholarship to go back to school so I can skill-up.
  • As a continuing student, I am running out of income and need scholarships to continue school.
  • As a single mom going to school, I need to find scholarships so I can continue my education.
  • As a grad student, I need to find scholarships so I can obtain my Masters degree.

Universities

  • As a university I want to offer scholarships to students who meet the GPA requirements
  • As a university I want to offer scholarships to students who meet the income level requirements
  • As a university I want to offer scholarships to students who meet the demographic requirements
  • As a university I want to offer scholarships to students who meet disability requirements
  • As a university I want to offer scholarships to students with military background
  • As a university I want to offer scholarships to 1st time college students

Foundations

  • As a Foundation scholarship provider I have minimally restrictive requirements to make my scholarship available for everyone

Scenarios

  1. Sally is the first person in her family to go to college who has no idea on how to find a scholarship and nobody can help her.
  2. Rachel comes from an educated family background and they are financially stable.
  3. System shall aggregate data from other websites to compile resources.

Plan

  • How can we provide a list of scholarships? The Dev team would have to access the research on the API and pull information into the org without it building records.  
  • How do we present it to the user?  Experience cloud?  We need someone who is familiar with open API.
  • How can we help students find scholarships? Create a profile.  Searchable by criteria and sortable by filters.
  • How might we improve the application process? Open in a new window so their search results would live in the experience window.  
  • How can we help students keep track of their scholarships? Create a junction object where you can take an action on the scholarship?  Interested (heart), Applied (check), Ineligible, Awarded, Not awarded.
  • If there is no open api then build a flow template to use within an existing non profit org that has records for scholarships and students and matching them.  Much more intensive but could happen at the minimum.

Questions

  1. Priorities: Is it more important to have the aggregated list of scholarships that can help compare “apples to apples”, or a portal for the student to fill in their info?
  2. Scholarship.com or FastWeb meets basic criteria.  
  1. How are they accessing the API’s?  
  2. How do we aggregate the information?  
  3. Would need a dev and someone with industry experience.
  1. Bare minimum, I should be able to see if I am eligible and then check mark it if I am ineligible. Manual ability to mark interested, not interested, ineligible.
  2. Down the road, maybe we have a form on the site where foundations can ask to be a part of the site so that they can be monitored.