Offering a scholarship program for your employees’ children and grandchildren has many benefits for both the employer and employee.
Many employees may be feeling the pinch of tuition fees for their university or college-bound children. The pandemic has put a strain on family finances, and some children may not have been able to work and save money for their tuition during this time. Companies can help these employees bear this cost by providing a scholarship program for their children and grandchildren.
Benefits
There are many benefits to providing a scholarship program for your employees’ family members:
- Helps attract and retain employees
- Shows support and an investment in the families of its employees
- Demonstrates community spirit and goodwill to future employees
- Tax incentives may be available based local tax laws
Things to Consider
There are many important considerations when creating and managing an Employee Scholarship Program:
- Do you have the resources to manage the program – application submissions and supporting documents, selecting recipients, and repeating the process the following year?
- What will your applicant information package look like?
- What information should you be collecting in the application and how will this relate to the selection of awardees?
- What is the eligibility criteria and how is it enforced?
- How will the selection of recipients be determined?
- What reports will you need from the system?
- How do you track year-over-year ongoing eligibility of scholarship recipients?
- How do you announce and promote the program each year?
There are a lot of decisions to be made before embarking on an employee scholarship program. If you have ever collected pdf application forms by email, along with supporting documents, you understand how extremely time-consuming it can be, requiring many resources to collate, determine eligibility, create excel spreadsheets of data, and photocopy packages for reviewers, just to name a few. An online scholarship management system can easily takeover tasks such as eligibility checking, timelines, emails, reports and decision-making, resulting in a more efficient use of your time and that of your teams, while making it easier for your applicants and reviewers.
Online Scholarship Management Systems at a Glance
There are many features to consider when looking into a scholarship management system. There are many options to choose from that might be tempting, such as free online form or survey tools, but security, management of the end-of-end process, integrated email, data reporting and tracking of continued qualification requirements should be top considerations when researching a system.
The following features should also be part of your requirements list:
- Secure, requiring user registration
- Eligibility criteria enforcement
- Data collection of important information, such as employee ID, name and GPA scores
- Allowing applications to be saved as “work in progress” until the deadline
- Upload supporting materials and seek references electronically
- Send automatic reminders
- Ability for selection committee members to review applications online with an evaluation rubric that includes comments, while “blinding” specific personally identifiable information about the applicant (or preventing conflict of interest)
- Send system emails and contracts notifying scholarship recipients that they have won a scholarship (as well as non-recipients)
- Easily submission by recipients of ongoing yearly GPA scores, enrolment confirmations and other scholarship requirements, allowing administrators to easily keep track of the submissions
- Ability for scholarship recipients to provide future updates as to how the scholarship impacted their careers
- Ability to create understand application data such as demographics as well as summarize reviewer scores
Employee Scholarships will benefit not only the employees and their families, but also the company itself in many ways. Ensuring your organization understands your requirements when choosing a scholarship management system will save time, resources and provide you with a seamless, scalable, end-to-end compliant and secure system for many years to come.
RQ Awards is an all-in-one system for the management of awards, fellowships, scholarships, grants, and mentorship programs, and any other application submission program that requires a review and evaluation process.
We work with associations, educational institutions and organizations to streamline and automate their processes. From simple workflows to complex multi-phased reviews, RQ Awards is user-friendly and efficient.
Contact us to learn more about how RQ Awards can easily manage your end-to-end Program.