January Challenge: What's your favorite product tip/trick?

Crystal Bruce

This month, we want to hear from you about your favorite product tip/trick that you use to make your work life easier and more productive.

Maybe you have a shortcut that saves you time, a feature that enhances your workflow, or a creative way to use our products that others might not know about. Whatever it is, we would love to learn from you and see how you use our products to achieve your goals.

To participate, simply reply to this post with your favorite product tip/trick and explain how it helps you. You can also comment on other members' posts and ask questions or give feedback.

The more we share, the more we grow as a community!

Russel Heskin

@Crystal Bruce At WesternU, we've used Award Management to collect students' requests for our University's Student Emergency Support Fund. We set it up like a scholarship, and the application is always open. The Emergency Fund Committee includes staff from Student Affairs and Financial Aid, who have quick and easy access to review the applications. Using Award Management saved us from having to create a separate process. A couple years ago, we also used Award Management for our students to request COVID Relief Funds, a process that took just a few minutes to set up and activate.

Tara Mata

@Russel Heskin, we have considered this approach as well, do you use a Flexible Application for this? I would love to hear more about your Student Emergency Support Fund process and application if you would be willing to share. Thank you!

Aimee McDonald

@Tara Mata as would I. We just started Award Management in October and are excited about the possibilities it can provide.

Linda Wright

@Russel Heskin
We have been advised to do Cycle Management after our Fall semester each year so that we can begin accepting applications for the next academic year. This leaves us awarding for Spring using archived data. How are you able to keep accepting emergency fund applications?

Betcy Scaria

@Linda Wright
You can use a Flexible Application which does not affect your normal General Application/archive process. It is a stand alone application.

Russel Heskin

@Linda Wright We only do cycle management once a year, so the Emergency Fund application is only offline for thosee one or two days during cycle management.

Russel Heskin

@Tara Mata We did consider using a flexible application, but we felt a regular scholarship application would meet our needs and didn't want to use up our one flexible application in case that was needed for something else. I'd be happy to jump on a Teams or Zoom call to discuss and show you our Emergency Fund application. Reach out to me at rheskin@westernu.edu to set something up.

Russel Heskin

@Aimee McDonald I'd be happy to jump on a Teams or Zoom call to discuss and show you our Emergency Fund application. Reach out to me at rheskin@westernu.edu to set something up.

Mallorie Fonseca

There are several to choose from, but the first one to come to mind right now is the grid view options. I love being able to create a grid view to save for later. I can't even count how many times in a year someone asks me to run a list for information that is in Award Management that they are not as familiar with as I am. Saving those views and customizing them before downloading the list helps me save time and make the list for them to pull themselves in the future. I even use it for some of our review group meetings and it cut out hours of review time for our large scholarships.

Alanna Shockley

Students often forget to include their ID number when they email me. The quickest way for me to pull it up is just to copy/paste their email in the BBAM omni search bar.

I like the reference questionnaire, and I think it's great that a reference only needs to complete a questionnaire once, and it will be used for all awards where the applicant input their information. We've heard quite a bit of positive feedback from faculty about that feature in particular.