Know What Has to Happen Each Week Before Your Scholarship Opens

A 30-minute session that counts backward from opening day, so your dates, criteria, application and reviewers are ready before the first student applies. Every registrant gets a planning calendar to fill in with your own opening date.

Most scholarship windows open between January and March, and everything students and reviewers will see gets set in the weeks before: the dates, the criteria, the application, reference requests, the reviewer list and the emails that go out along the way. For winter openings, the holidays take a week or two out of the middle of that stretch.

Programs rarely fall behind because someone dropped the ball. They fall behind because the work isn't on a calendar, so the criteria get finished the week the form opens and reviewers get asked once applications are already coming in.

This session is built around two of the five dimensions of Review Integrity, a framework for judging whether an application and review process is fair, consistent and defensible.

The first is Rubric Clarity: are your criteria written, weighted and visible to students before they apply? Criteria finished after applications arrive mean students applied without knowing what counted, and reviewers each fill in the gaps their own way.

The second is Intake Proportionality: does what you ask of an applicant scale to what's at stake for them? An application copied from last year, because there wasn't time to change it, often asks for more than the decision needs.

When setup runs late, the program pays for it all season. Students get less time to apply, and the ones with the least help run out of it first. Reviewers start without a shared scorecard, and some don't finish. The deadline weeks go to cleanup instead of answering applicants. And when a donor or board member asks why a student was chosen, the answer rests on criteria nobody saw ahead of time.

Whatever is in place on opening day is what your program runs on for the whole cycle. Count back from that day, and the time to start is earlier than most teams expect.

In This 30-Minute Session, You'll Learn How To:

• Set your opening, closing, reference, review and decision dates first, counted back from opening day
• Write and weight your criteria before the form opens, and show them to students
• Cut your application to what the decision needs, with eligibility questions up front
• Give students save-and-return, and request reference letters automatically with their own deadline and reminders
• Line up reviewers before applications arrive, decide who reads what, and give each one the same scorecard
• Plan the emails students get, from confirmation to reminders to decisions

You'll also see how Reviewr's team builds your program from the forms you already use, in about 30 days.

What You'll Get

The Week-by-Week Launch Countdown, a planning calendar you can fill in with your own opening date.

Who Should Attend

Scholarship administrators at foundations, nonprofits, associations, credit unions, companies and education foundations, plus committee chairs and volunteers who help get applications open each year.

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