Guidelines for Awarding Scholarships on a Yearly and Semesterly Basis Simultaneously

Jordan Martinez

Hello all,


We currently award all scholarships on a yearly basis. Here's our current yearly timeline:

• Late January: Cycle Management
• February - April: Students apply (i.e. General Application is open during this time only)
• May: Applications are reviewed
• June-July: Recipients are awarded
• July-September: Post-Acceptance work is completed
• September: Some recipients drop classes; urgent rush to find replacement recipients
• October - January: ad hoc awards due to various circumstances

However, there are times we need to award specific scholarships on a semester basis. My general question is, "What are best practices for doing that?" More specifically...

1. For scholarship awarded by semester, my current understanding is that one will use 1 Opportunity per semester. Is that correct? If so, what problems arise when doing that?
2. To make it possible for students to apply to semester-only scholarships, that requires opening up the General Application at two points in the year: once in the Spring and once in the Fall. Is that correct? If so, what issues arise when doing that?
3. What problems have others who have had to do this run into?
4. Is it possible to have two "General Applications" open at the same time? For example, let's say I have a few students who should get awards in February who also couldn't submit a general application due to various circumstances. I must login as the user, create a Draft application, force-apply them to a scholarship, and then award the scholarship to them. If I do cycle management in January, is this approach even possible?

Robin Kory

Hi Jordan,


We run our scholarships by term with different priority deadlines so we have them open for Spring and Fall or Summer and Fall at the same time. Fall has 3 different deadlines. Our one General Application is open almost all year until all scholarships have been awarded in late summer and we do Cycle Management. I am not aware of being able to have two General Applications at the same time, but I could be wrong.


My biggest issue with this is that Blackbaud names my opportunities for me by the date of opening or closing (however you configure it) rather than letting me name them myself. When I first open them up in the fall, I can have three opportunities named the same thing and I cannot tell which is which without opening them up. The only way for students to be able to tell which scholarship they should apply for is by writing the term at the beginning of the description of the opportunity (Fall 2021, etc.). If you have deadlines that fall into Blackbaud's different naming categories then you shouldn't have a problem with this.


This causes issues with reporting and searching as well. I am hoping that I have worked around this problem by adding Award Periods and Fund Periods to search on. Only time will tell.


I hope this answers some of your questions. You may not have the same issues if your deadlines are significantly different, but with our deadlines starting out the same due to priority deadlines, it causes us a lot of problems for us. Blackbaud is aware of the situation and has not not addressed it.

Jordan Martinez

Thank you Robin for the response.


Here's my understanding of what you said above. You award scholarships on a term basis (Fall, Spring, Summer). Let's say things were a bit different at your institution to establish a basis of understanding. Let's say Scholarship X was only awarded in the Spring and Summer and only had a single deadline for each term. In such a case, you would create an Opportunity for Scholarship X for the Spring and a separate Opportunity for Scholarship X in the Summer. Is that correct?


However, in reality, you have Scholarship Y, which is awarded in the Fall and Spring, and Fall has 3 different deadlines whereas the Spring one does not. In that case, you have 4 Opportunities:

1. Fall (Deadline 1)

2. Fall (Deadline 2)

3. Fall (Deadline 3)

4. Spring


While the Spring term isn't an issue, the Fall term is an issue. When you create the 3 Fall Opportunities, AW will name them similarly because their "Season" date is the same (e.g. Fall 2020). Thus, you cannot immediately determine which Opportunity corresponds to which deadline because of this naming issue. So, when a student wants to apply to Scholarship Y, do they apply to 1, 2, or 3? When you want to figure out some information involving Deadline 2, is it 1, 2, or 3? Is that correct?


You said that you are trying to better handle this situation by using Award Periods and Fund Periods. Could you further clarify how that helps?


Lastly, it sounds like you CAN do cycle management in the Summer because all awards have been made by then and, most importantly, the awards are final and will not change afterwards. Is that correct?


If my understanding is correct, then I think I could try to implement a workaround like you have, but I'm not sure whether it's worth it. We do our cycle management in early Spring for two reasons. First, awards we make for the Fall semester aren't final and can change. While awards can change in the Spring semester, I don't think such changes are as relevant due to other reports we do before such changes become known. Second, we do full-year awards in the Summer, so we can't do cycle management there.


If our scholarships that are awarded by term are small, it will likely be easier to award such scholarships outside of Academic Works.

Robin Kory

Hi Jordan,


In your scenario with scholarship Y, I would really only have 2 Opportunities:

1. Fall (We open and close the same opportunity 2 or 3 times depending on the scholarship)

2. Spring


I figured it would be way too complicated having 3 separate opportunities for fall. I just use the same one and close it for the deadline, have the applications reviewed if necessary and open it back up again. Our main reason for doing this is our high school scholarships. We wanted to be able to give them an answer earlier in the year so that they would know that they had a scholarship to our College and factor that into their decision. But, it seems like most students don't apply until the last minute and if we did not post them again, we would miss a lot of applicants. Also, to have them open longer to get more applicants.


Yes, the problem comes in with the season date. All the opportunities can have the same season date since the fall deadlines usually correspond to the spring or summer deadlines. I just have to open them up to see which one I need. At least I can add the term (Fall 2021) to the description for students so they know which one to apply for.


Yes, I just recently created Award Periods and Fund Periods under Site - Configurations. I then add the Fund Period (2021 Fall, 2021 Spring) when I create an Opportunity. I believe this will help in the future to search or report on the scholarships we had available for each specific term. I also started adding the Award Period when I offer an award to a student (2021 Fall, 2021 Spring). It seems like this could also help with searching/reporting also. I am not sure if I will use them, but we need something to differentiate them by term.


Yes, we started doing Cycle Management in late summer after almost all of the awards are given out and they don't usually change. We then start everything over in the fall. It is really complicated here though because we have at least one scholarship that really never goes away. I have found it easier to just archive all of the opportunities myself and then have them do all of the other Cycle Management stuff. I don't really know if this is the correct way to do things, but with what is needed here, it seems to work out ok. I think we are definitely stretching the limits of Award Management.


It does get really complicated and it seems like I learn something new all of the time (a new problem or a new solution). You may just want to award them outside of Award Management. Others that read this may have other solutions or ideas also. I am definitely not an expert on all of this, but these are pitfalls that I have come across.