Overview
The Solanco School District is a mid-sized public school district located in Pennsylvania. Their mission is to foster an engaging and supportive environment, while maximizing students’ academic potential. As a result, the entire staff of the school district works every day with the goal of raising lifelong learners and responsible citizens.
Challenge
The school district developed a generous and comprehensive scholarship program to encourage the growth of each student. Each year, the school district offers 60+ scholarships to their students for things such as participation in the marching band or an interest in pursuing agricultural science in college.
The Solanco School District developed a paper-based, manual scholarship management system for 60 different programs. Students needed to pick up scholarship application paperwork, complete by hand, and return to the counselor by the deadline. After the application deadline, administrators mailed the paperwork to 60 different review boards to review and score hundreds of applications. Clearly, this was an incredibly high friction process.
As a result, the school district received fewer number of completed applications than expected each year. Since everything was paper-based, the administrators could not track any metrics related to the programs. The time consuming, manual, and paper-based process caused headaches for everyone involved.
Furthermore, with local businesses, alumnae, and individual sponsors, it was difficult to showcase each scholarships’ brand. With Kaleidoscope, they were able to introduce unique branding for each scholarship, strengthening the identity of the sponsor and creating relationships with applicants through effective branding and storytelling.
Finally, Solanco decided to digitize their scholarship programs.
Solution
For these reasons, Solanco decided to shift all of their programs to Kaleidoscope’s all-in-one scholarship management software. The Solanco School district ended the paper-based process and Kaleidoscope digitized their 60 scholarship programs, thus removing the need for any manual work from students or administrators.
Results
Today, the School district offers a 100% digital scholarship program using Kaleidoscope’s scholarship management software. Solanco received more applications than ever before. Kaleidoscope helps administrators better track applicants and provides insights into each program. By simplifying the manual process, their review board and administration has more time to focus on finding the best applicant. With Kaleidoscope, managing a program is simple and students have access to more scholarship opportunities in the platform’s digital marketplace!
If you want to learn how you can move your scholarship programs off of paper and spreadsheets and into the cloud, we’d love to get in touch with you.
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