by Bright Ewuru | Aug 11, 2022 | Article
We know you’re eager as a grantmaker or scholarship provider to fund good causes—and you probably wish sometimes you could fund everyone.
But, eventually, funding decisions must be made. And, before you even get to the decision-making process, it’s ideal to create eligibility requirements to divert applicants who don’t fit the funding opportunity from the onset.
If a grantseeker or student doesn’t meet the basic requirements, the best option is to refrain from applying. However, they can get overly ambitious in their quest for funds and apply regardless.
Who knows? They just might get lucky.
Therefore, as a grant or scholarship manager, it can be a huge time-saver to harness an online eligibility screener to divert any unqualified applicants automatically.
Eligibility screening is a coordinated qualifying test that asks applicants a few simple yet targeted questions to define their admissibility into a specific grantmaking or scholarship program, match them into the best-suited program out of many or decide how the application process should be tailored to suit each applicant.
The advantages of using eligibility screening for your grant and scholarship provision opportunities include effortless screening of applications, a reduction of support costs, streamlined and quicker application and review process for both applicants and your team of administrators and easy filtering of your applicants into an appropriate funding opportunity.
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Let’s unwrap five simple steps to create eligibility screening for grant and scholarship seekers.
The best practice in building online eligibility screening is to identify its place in your application process. Determining its place gives you a clear idea of how it will serve the process.
Naturally, the mention of an eligibility screener can spark thoughts of disqualification; that doesn’t have to always be the case.
To begin with, if your organisation has multiple programs, you might need an eligibility screener to sort the applicants into suitable programs. Their responses to the questions asked in the screener can give a good direction on which program or funding opportunity best fits.
An eligibility screener can also serve to adjust and modify the application process to suit the various applicants. Their answers would help determine whether certain stages, tasks or forms should be reviewed or added. Since applicants’ responses would vary, each one would have an application process specific to them.
Finally, the prevailing function of an online eligibility screener is to help moderate a large collection of applications, quickly. If their answers reveal that they don’t meet the program’s requirements, they simply get diverted.
Noteworthy is the fact that these varying uses of an online eligibility screener are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they are different, but they can all be simultaneously applied by a grantmaking organisation.
The essence of an eligibility screener is to evaluate.
So, how will you evaluate your applicants?
The kind of questions to ask depends on the nature of the program. For a scholarship program, the eligibility screener could contain any of the following requests:
For a grant program, eligibility criteria could be questions related to operations and the institution itself. For example: Are they incorporated as a non-profit? In what areas is their impact felt? Education, sustainability, social justice or another? Do they operate locally, regionally or globally? What’s their extent of community involvement?
The questions contained in this post are neither exhaustive nor are they set in stone. It’s all dependent on your application program and what matters to you.
Here are some helpful tips on framing questions:
These pointers can help ensure that the questions are relevant, focused and fair.
Creating and running grant and scholarship programs can be challenging. There is a lot to coordinate! If you are managing it all manually, there is the possibility of oversights which could lead to improper sorting, qualification of unqualified candidates and vice versa.
However, such risks can be avoided by using reliable grant management software like Good Grants, which comes with a built-in eligibility screener. It allows you to automatically screen applications as they come in, diverting any unqualified applications automatically based on the reponses the applicants provide.
An eligibility screener that isn’t backed up with transparency will lead to anxious and disgruntled applicants on one part and frustrated administrators on the other. This is because your applicants will keep worrying about their status and will follow up with an endless barrage of inquiry emails.
To pre-empt this challenge, communication is a must. Keep your applicants informed about their status as well as the next steps. If they don’t meet the basic requirements and can’t advance, let them know. (In Good Grants, for example, diverted applicants are immediately sent an email notification.)
Use email notifications to keep your applicants in the loop as their application moves through the grant lifecycle.
Building an online eligibility screener involves tracking its efficacy. You need to ascertain whether the scholarship or grant screening was as engaging and time-saving as you had anticipated. Check to see if the questions are comprehensive yet narrow enough to ensure proper filtering.
If the eligibility screening didn’t yield the desired results, pinpoint the issue and take adequate steps to tweak it to perfection.
In closing, basic requirements outlined by grantmakers and scholarship providers are an effective way to screen all applications for eligibility. And an online eligibility screener will ensure that those basic requirements are met, all while saving time for all program participants.
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