Timeline for Post-Acceptance Submission

Courtney Roberts

Hi All! For those of you who use BAM for your scholarship awarding and thank-you note collection, do you give a deadline by which they must complete their Post-Acceptance, and if so, what does that timeframe look like? Our university does not currently have a deadline but would like to implement one, as we have had a little trouble with award funds left in limbo when students simply never complete their Post-Acceptance. As we work on crafting a new policy, we'd love to hear what other institutions are doing. Thanks in advance for anything you can share!

Jonathan Blevins

Hello, @Courtney Roberts!

Our office requires that students submit their post-acceptance or forfeit their scholarship offer. All language from our office states this and we make sure to have clear record-keeping for potential down-stream issues

This year, our post-acceptance opened on April 5, 2023, and will close on April 28, 2023. When setting our timeline, we make sure that post-acceptance doesn't take place during either finals prep week or finals week. During this time, we send weekly emails to students and during those last few days I will call students with the phone number they supply during the application process.

We have a high success rate and failures tend to be either students that didn't have internet access (field studies, active duty, etc.) or students that will not be attending.

Courtney Roberts

That is incredibly helpful, @Jonathan Blevins - thank you for the thorough response!

Joel Spiess

@Courtney Roberts, we have the same issue. We have hundreds of opportunities administered in a very decentralized way across our large campus of 24,000 students. So each scholarship has its own deadlines, etc. Our campus had been allowing weeks of time for students to complete post-acceptance questions. We found this year that tightening the window has helped. We have been allowing just one week from the offer to complete post-acceptance, and we have seen a significant increase in students completing the post-acceptance questions before the deadline.

We have also issued guidance to awarding units that if a student misses the deadline, they should rescind the offer and move on to the next qualified student. This is only practical if you have a healthy pool of applicants from which to draw. We tell the student we will do this in the post-acceptance requested communication.

We also started using the applicant name merge field in the post-acceptance requested email subject line to hopefully catch students' attention when they scroll through their inboxes.

Courtney Roberts

Hi @Joel Spiess, thank you for your input! Our awarding is also fairly decentralized, with differing timelines across the university, so it is helpful to hear a similarly-placed institution navigates that. With a fairly tight window like that, do you send out reminders at any point after the initial award notification?

Joel Spiess

@Courtney Roberts, we do not send out any manual reminders – only the BAM-generated automated reminders with the pre-set delivery based on student inaction. It is working for us.

Russel Heskin

@Courtney Roberts At WesternU, we give students at least two weeks to complete post-acceptance. We are fortunate that a vast majority of our scholarships are on the same timeline; so this year, our colleges had to “select” their recipients by Friday, March 31, and then our students were given at least two weeks (and three weekends) to complete post-acceptance by Monday, April 17. Students received an automated reminder from BAM ten days before the deadline (Friday, April 7), and I send emails through BAM on the following Monday or Tuesday (six or seven days before the deadline). Then four or five days before the deadline, I remind each college's opportunity administrator how to look up who has yet to complete their post-acceptance questionnaire and ask them to personally reach out to those students. We had about a dozen students miss the deadline, so I have been extending that two days at a time and nagging the colleges to nag their students. This Sunday is our final deadline. We've never had to rescind an award, and this is our fourth year using BAM.