Scholarship Program Impact and Sustainability: FAQs for Providers
When we talk with scholarship providers, a few key issues come up time and again. If you’re like many of the organizations we work with, you’ve likely asked yourself:
Our scholarships are supposed to be opening doors for students—but are we really making an impact?
How can we make it easier for our team to run this program year after year?
Below, we dive into the two critical aspects every scholarship provider should examine: impact and sustainability. Use this guide to assess your work against these must-haves for any top-tier program.
Impact
Q: What change do we want to make in the world?
Scholarship programs have the potential to change lives, but to realize that potential, you need a clear vision of the change you’re aiming for. What outcomes do you want your scholarships to achieve? Is it helping students from underrepresented backgrounds access higher education, improving retention and graduation rates, or ensuring recipients transition into meaningful careers? Answering these questions will help you design your program with intention—and stay focused.
To define your intended impact more clearly, we recommend two key steps:
Work with your team to brainstorm answers to this question. This is an opportunity to think creatively about what’s possible for the students you serve and the broader community. Don’t be afraid to aim big—whether it’s closing educational gaps, promoting social mobility, or fostering future leaders.
Use your responses to build out a logic model. Logic models are incredible tools that provide a visual representation of your program and its intended impact. This helps you map out how your program’s activities lead to the desired outcomes, making it easier to assess whether you're on track or need to make adjustments.
Q: Who should we serve?
The answer to this one might seem straightforward, but when you start digging, you’ll find that it’s more complex than you think. There are some student populations in your community or potential service population for whom your mission would be the difference between college access, graduation, and living wage jobs.
Here’s how to help answer this one:
Use publicly available data—like the Census or its American Community Survey, the National Center for Education Statistics, or higher education policy groups like the Lumina Foundation and the Education Trust—to understand student populations.
Consider race, gender, age, geography, and other identity characteristics, but don’t stop there. Think about students’ cultural backgrounds, educational experiences, and unique challenges.
Talk to community partners. Do you make grants to organizations serving students? Ask their team members what information they have on student groups. Have relationships with local colleges and universities? Use their enrollment and persistence data.
Q: What’s the right scholarship for those students? Are there other interventions we should consider?
Your best bet: Ask students themselves! Engage directly with those you’re trying to serve to understand the truest picture of their needs, in terms of both financial aid and wraparound services. Don’t make assumptions! What are their biggest barriers? Is financial stress the top challenge, or are other issues just as important?
Your to-dos might include:
Create a survey for your target student population. If you already work with those student groups, survey them. Build external relationships to further your reach to students you don’t know yet. Be sure to incentivize completion (we always, always, always raffle off gift cards when conducting surveys!).
Ask questions like how much financial concerns shaped their college plans, what challenges they face that affect their academic life or career preparation, whether they feel supported as they work towards their educational goals, and what else they need to succeed. What barriers are they facing when it comes to accessing education, persisting through graduation, or securing good jobs? Who’s struggling the most, and how can you step in to make a difference?
Q: How can we tell if we’re making the impact we hope to?
The best way to measure your impact? If you’ve read this far, you know the answer…Go straight to the source—your scholarship recipients. Regularly engage with them to learn how your support has affected their lives. This kind of feedback not only helps you understand the value of your program but also informs improvements you can make moving forward.
Conduct check-ins each academic term or year. A fillable form, perhaps one tied to their scholarship renewal, is a great way to do this. Ask how the scholarship has helped them stay enrolled or succeed in college, if it’s impacted their stress or focus on studies, and about positive outcomes (and even challenges) they’ve experienced because of it.
Survey your alumni. Ask questions about whether or not they completed their degree and how the scholarship impacted their lives. (Be sure to incentivize this survey too!)
Don’t discount anecdotal feedback. Create a document or folder wherein you capture any feedback you receive in conversations with recipients or via other communications.
Consider all of this data when assessing your impact. You’ll likely have numbers, percentages, quotes, and stories that paint a well rounded, robust picture of whether you’re creating the outcomes you want.
Sustainability
Q: How can we make our program easy and efficient to administer?
Scholarship programs can get complicated. The key to sustainability is creating a simple, standardized process for each step—developing new opportunities, marketing them, selecting recipients, awarding scholarships, and engaging with students afterward. Streamlining your processes not only makes life easier for your team but also ensures a better experience for students.
Consider these best practices:
Use a single, annualized program calendar to keep everything on track. This is essential in the world of scholarships, since many activities are dependent and seasonal.
Develop a universal application that houses all your scholarship opportunities. This streamlines your work and is a huge benefit to student applicants.
Standardize the selection and awarding process for all scholarships. Pick just one approach and stick with it, regardless of how many committees you have, or how many payment strategies you’ve employed in the past.
Use the same post-award forms and communications for all recipients. Adapt your language so that it’s relevant no matter which of your recipients you’re communicating with.
Q: How can we attract, train, and retain top scholarship talent?
To keep your team strong, you need to create roles that are both manageable and meaningful. Staff can quickly burn out if the workload is overwhelming or if they feel disconnected from the impact their work is having.
Here’s how to set them up for success:
Simplify the scholarship process as much as possible—fewer complications mean happier staff. Use best practices described above, such as identifying your impact and target population—and always sticking to that. No mission drift! And streamline through having singular workflows, whether it’s how you work with donors, a universal application, or standardized selection, awarding, and post-award processes (no matter how many scholarships you offer).
Provide opportunities for professional development, like coaching from our consultants, or through participation in the National Scholarship Providers Association.
Most importantly, always connect your staff’s work to the broader goal: helping students succeed. Build time into their roles for meaningful student connection. This might include student advisory groups, hiring student employees, or hosting student events. It could also involve collecting important evaluative information through surveys, focus groups, interviews, and other feedback.
If you’re struggling with these same questions and want to improve the impact and sustainability of your scholarship program, we can help. Schedule a free 30-minute consultation call, and let’s work together to make your program both a success for the students you serve as well as a delight to run.
