Use post-award follow-ups to collect and manage post-award items from applicants such as thank-you letters, acceptance forms, photos, event RSVPs, school bursar addresses, etc. A few things need to be in place in order for post award follow-ups to work properly.
Configuring Post Award Follow-Ups
Under the Additional Requirements tab on the scholarship level in the ‘After Awarding’ section is where these items are set up. Click on 'Add Question' to view your options for creating follow-up questions (click here to learn more about different question types).
Note: You can re-use questions as well. To do this, search for the question you want to re-use in the ‘Add Question’ section. Use caution when re-using questions as sharing a question also shares an applicant’s responses on any scholarship it appears. If you require donor-specific thank-you letters, for example, you should refrain from re-using the same thank-you letter question across multiple scholarships.
Publish the scholarship award status
This should be done after you’ve selected recipients for a given scholarship and distributed award amounts to each awardee (to learn more about publishing scholarship award statuses, click here).
Publishing a scholarship’s award status causes two things to happen:
1. The award decision becomes visible to the applicant through the Scholarships list view:
2. The follow-ups are created and are visible on the applicant’s dashboard:
To Administrators, scholarship follow-ups can be accessed through the left-hand navigation menu, under the Tasks tab:
Post Award Follow-Up Notifications
AwardSpring does not automatically notify the student of pending follow-up work.
You may choose to include information about follow-up work in the Award template (letter). The Award template can be customized by going to the Emails tab> Templates (to learn more about this feature, click here). Here is an example of how you might call attention to follow-ups in an award letter:
Another option for notifying students of follow-up work is by emailing them directly from the Tasks tab. To do this, click the checkbox for the students you would like to email, and a drop-down menu will appear at the top. From the ‘Select bulk action’ dropdown menu select Send Email.
Then click on ‘Confirm’.
You’ll be brought to the Emails > Compose screen. The recipient field will be pre-populated with the emails of the recipients in your follow-up queue.
You will then need to draft and send an email to the recipients explaining that they have follow-up work to do. This message could be less of a direct award notification and focus strictly on follow-up work. For example:
Once the student logs in to complete their follow-up, they can click on follow-ups for each scholarship on their dashboard:
The follow-up screen will look slightly different depending on which types of questions were used. Once the recipient answers all required questions, the ‘Submit Follow-Up’ button will light up and they can click on it:
Once all follow-ups have been completed, the dashboard will display the total dollar amount the recipient has been awarded:
Managing Post Award Follow-Ups
When there is follow-up work for you to review, you will see a number in parentheses next to your Tasks menu item as well as on your Dashboard:
Click on a row to expand the follow-ups in a Take Action status to view the recipient’s follow-up work:
Decide what to do with the follow-up item and click Save:
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Disburse: This means you’re satisfied with the submitted work and no further action is needed. The student will remain in the “Award” state at the scholarship level.
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Cancel: This means you’ve decided to revoke this applicant’s award. The student’s scholarship-level status will be updated to “Denied.”
- Request Revision: If you need the recipient to re-submit their follow up work for some reason (wrong file uploaded, poor grammar, etc), type a message to them in the feedback for resubmission box, choose 'Request Revision' from the action menu and click ‘Save’. This will send an email to the applicant informing them that they need to re-submit their work. They’ll be able to do so when they log back into AwardSpring. When their work is re-submitted, the follow-up item’s status will change back to the ‘Take Action’ state.