Using the Flexible Application

Tambrea Hurst

We are seeking feedback from those who are using flexible or conditional applications. Please share the following:

• Why did you choose to use the flexible application?
• How are you using flexible applications?
• Why did you choose to use the conditional application?
• How are you using conditional applications?
• Has it been difficult to work between different application types?
• What are the pros and cons of using these different applications?

Thank you for sharing,

Tambrea Hurst

University of Central Florida

Joel Spiess

@Tambrea Hurst, we use both application types at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. We are a large, decentralized, public university with 14 schools/colleges and 25 individual awarding units. The central Office of Student Scholarships (my team) provides coordination for the campus.

We use conditional applications more frequently. Nearly each of our academic schools/colleges has its own conditional application from which they auto-match each of their individual opportunities. Thus, students complete the university's General Application, and then they also complete their school's conditional application. We use the qualifications to ensure that only students who have X major can see the conditional application relevant to them. It provides a way for each school/college to reduce the number of individual apply-tos. They look at all their opportunities and then identify which questions to ask on their conditional application to ensure they can auto-match their opportunities from it. In the end, most students complete just two applications: the General Application and their school/college's conditional application. It serves us well. Approximately 85% of our nearly 1,000 active opportunities are auto-match as a result of this process.

We use flexible applications less frequently. The best example is our College of Business, which uses it for incoming freshmen. The college has numerous large or full-ride awards, and thus, they want the students to answer essays, etc., to earn scholarships. But they don't want the student to have to complete the university's General Application in order to apply for the college's scholarships. The benefit of the flexible application is that it produces a unique URL that will take the recipient directly to that application. The downside, at least in our case, is that the student must still authenticate using their university credentials in order to access the flexible application.

We don't find it difficult to work between different application types, although, for both of the above, our central Office of Student Scholarships provides much greater hands-on support to our school/college awarding units than we do with the standard apply-to or auto-match opportunities.

I hope this helps!

Tambrea Hurst

@Joel Spiess, this is very, very, helpful! You have brought utilization together with concept in a way that is easy to understand. THANK YOU so much for sharing, and doing so with detail.

Russel Heskin

@Tambrea Hurst, like Joel, we have are decentralized with multiple Awards Committees (by College). Some of our colleges use their conditional application simply to collect a CV/resume from each applicant, rather than have their applicants upload a CV/resume for each individual application. We also use a single conditional application for the handful of University-wide awards. And finally, one of our colleges has traditionally had their students nominate their classmates for various awards. It doesn't work perfectly, but they were able to turn their conditional application into a nomination form. The down side of this is they cannot easily review these nominations, since the imported information and reviewer scores would be that of the nominator and not the nominee. They have to export and manipulate the data outside of BAM, which creates more work.

Tambrea Hurst

@Russel Heskin, the use of the application for nominations is very creative. Thank you for sharing the other side of this creativity with the added workload to make it happen. We have one college that relies heavily on resumes and community service work. Maybe this will be an avenue for them in that regard. Your examples bring thought to mind. Thank you!

Gail Sherron

@Tambrea Hurst at the University of Kansas we use our only flexible application for scholarship petitions. If a student did not meet renewal criteria and are no longer scholarship eligible, students can complete this application and be considered for an exception for reinstatement. It has been a blessing!

Tambrea Hurst

@Gail Sherron, this is another creative, outside the box, idea! Thank you.

Ann Schubert

@Tambrea Hurst I work at Austin Community College which a large multi campus college. We purchased additional flexible applications for various unique opportunities. We like that we can tailor the application when the standard general application does not fit the need of a scholarship or program. The con is we could probably use more, but they are an extra expense. We utilize them for:

• Scholarship recipient appeals each semester if they do not meet the criteria of their scholarship.
• Dual credit scholarships for current high school students.
• Continuing Education scholarships as they run on a much more flexible schedule than our college credit courses.
• A summer scholarship that is awarded to students in a particular scholarship program who have run out of funding. We only need to ask them a few questions.

Lindley Davis

@Tambrea Hurst

We hope to obtain more than the one flexible app we currently have. We've found it to be very useful and easy to work with! We are a large, decentralized institution. While we are in the process of streamlining our application process, the flexible application has been very useful for scholarships that fall outside of our typical application cycle.

We do not award through the flexible application. We open an opportunity and force-match the selected recipient to the opportunity. If we award through the flexible application and need to archive and recycle it, we lose the ability to make award adjustments if needed

Our art department has recently expressed an interest in using a flexible application for their portfolio review process. If we're able to get additional flexible apps in the future, we'll be able to accommodate their request.

Feel free to DM if you have questions!

Tambrea Hurst

@Lindley Davis, thank you for sharing.

Alanna Shockley

@Tambrea Hurst Thank you for starting this thread! It's been really interesting to see how flexible applications are used by other schools. We only have on flexible application available to us, and we currently use it to collect applications for emergency bursaries. Previously students had to come to our office and fill out paper applications, and provide printed supporting documentations. When Covid hit we adopted the flexible application to collect these applications, and it improved our ability to both receive and process those applications in a much more timely manner. Additionally, some students find it really stressful to come in to submit this applications. I think having it online anonymizes it a little bit, and makes it a little easier for students to ask for these funds.