The OpenWater Blog

OpenWater 101: Using OpenWater to Manage Your Scholarships

Educational institutions, foundations, non-profits, and businesses all use OpenWater to distribute their funds to worthy students. All of these organizations award scholarships to students with one charitable purpose: to support students of merit and therefore support a talent pipeline that would hopefully one day make their way back. However, regardless of where the scholarship comes from or how much it is, being able to process applicants quickly, fairly, and securely, is something that everybody wants out of the application experience.

How does a Scholarship Management Software work?

OpenWater Scholarships centralizes all applicants, materials, and reviewers in one simple, secure environment. Administrators have a view of the entire process. A streamlined process provides a more efficient review of applicants. Hours of administrative work are eliminated, allowing for time investment in other areas.

Standout Features: 

• • Customizable Forms and a Branded Entry Portal
  • Letter of Reference capability (multiple file formats)
  • Email confirmations for all completed applications
  • Customizable reviewers to ensure greater fairness
  • Multiple review rounds for scholarships that require it
  • Multiple program support that can house as many scholarship programs as you need under one roof
  • …and more

Encourage Greater Fairness

Scholarship Management Softwares aren’t all about automation. It’s also about increasing transparency and fairness throughout the application process. For example, using OpenWater’s Scholarship Management Software, applicants benefit from  auto-scoring that applies the same rules to every single application if the application requires any kind of pre-qualification workflow. This ensures that all applicants start on equal footing as they pass through multiple review rounds. On the other end of the application, reviewer recusals to prevent conflict-of-interest situations are a lot simpler using a software solution. Recusal does not disrupt or slow the evaluation process.

Boost Program Visibility

Forget costly IT time. Any administrator can quickly set-up an on-brand website to promote a scholarship program using a Scholarship Management Software program like OpenWater’s. Create beautiful micro-sites using the OpenWater Scholarship Template Engine. Customize the website to cross-reference your scholarship with other marketing material. All this may appear vain and inconsequential, but ignoring the importance of branding can prove to be a misstep in today’s brand-conscious atmosphere – even in academia.

So there it all is. Especially in today’s day and age where administrators are being railroaded with more applications than they’ve ever received, having some form of automation in the application and review process can do miles to ensure that the integrity of the scholarship experience gets preserved.

Still not sure if an Scholarship Management Software is what you need? Click here to find out more about OpenWater’s Scholarship Management Software solution and Growthstack.

Already with OpenWater’s Scholarship Management Software? Have you checked if your organization is OpenWater certified? Hurry! Check out our calendar to find out about upcoming webinars and certification programs.

Miriam Hancock

Miriam Hancock
Miriam is the Marketing Coordinator for OpenWater. When she isn't writing and designing content she paints and cooks for her own personal blog.

Women in the Room: Part 1 – The Value of Gender-Balanced Conference Panels

A Hard Look At The Numbers: What You Should Know about SaaS in 2019