Scholars United Reviews

The ease of use! I enjoy creating sections for my applications because it is very self-directed and easy to understand. With minimal issues I have crafted multiple scholarship and grant applications, and each and every one is customizable with lots of options! We also enjoy learning all of the new functions we can utilize as time goes on. It's nice knowing that when I set something up in CF it will work. One thing we could explore in the future is blind applications.

What I like least is the limitations on reports that can be run from the system. There is a built-in AdHoc Reports feature, but it is limited to Excel. I would love for there to be different ways to run the reports - mainly Microsoft Word or Publisher. Our issue is we have essays with some of our scholarships, and fitting an essay box on an Excel spreadsheet while still trying to make it user friendly isn't possible! I would love to see reports where each each qualifying student could have all of the information needed on one page of a report. So if there are 15 students who qualify, there would be 15 pages, one for each student, in the report. Easier to read than an Excel spreadsheet that scrolls and scrolls.

Support Team. Ease of use. Cost to operate compared to the previous solution. Road map for the future.

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Kevin, Thank you so much for this review! Our team here at CommunityForce is honored to have P.E.O International as a dedicated customer! Looking forward to many years of partnership!

We found that our users of our scholarship platform found the software was easy to input information and that the technology requirements was not overwhelming. In addition, we found once we learned the system, we, as administrators found it easier to work with. If you have strong skills in technology you will love the autonomy of this system.

It was not always easy to go into the system to clone the application and then make necessary changes in the new application. It did require a lot of learning and reviewing numerous videos to find the best way to proceed. In all honesty, this was a self service platform and one needed to become very adept at the technology required to fully implement the application platform. In addition, it was not possible to have multiple applications opened, released and tracked simultaneously and easily which was a requirement for our college saving account application. By means of tracking, there was no way to develop student profiles and connect email communication directly to the student that would cover an extended period of time.

Thank you for the awesome feedback Joyce! If you have any suggestions or feature requests, please submit your ideas in our client support portal!

Pros: As a one-person shop, I am able to manage the lifecycle of the fellowship applications without a full team backing me up.

Cons: One item we have requested is the ability to have even more customized status details so that we can apply multiple status’ to an application.

I like that this product employs case logic technology so that our applicants can be screened prior to creating a profile and starting an application, or applying for the one of our multiple scholarships using the wrong application form. I also like that students are allowed to upload supporting documents into the application.

Our selections criteria and scoring matrix are very complex and don't really synch well with SU's evaluation system. As such, we score our applications separately outside of the system, which isn't all that bad because it's very easy to export the application data to a MS Excel spreadsheet. It would be nice if CF and SU could add a CRM feature to their product so that we can continue tracking student payments while they are receiving funding from our program, and then after they've graduated, keep them in the system for alumni cultivation and communication purposes.

This program has streamlined our application process by 100%. We received twice as many applications and the students were very computer savvy so it was a breeze for them to fill out. The emails sent to them were received and they responded if they had questions so it was very helpful to be able to email more than one person at a time. The spreadsheet to export was nice to have when a complete list of applicants was needed. This program made this years application process a fantastic experience instead of the dread each year when 50 applications showed up on the due date! Our mailroom was quite happy as well! Overall this was a delight to have this year and look forward to next year!

What I do not like is the Help Center. I have tried to type in simple questions like "how to sort columns" there was not an answer for it. I loved the training videos that I participated in an simply watch those for the information. I feel that the training videos on the Help Center were made by the computer savvy employees of the company that are way more technical that the average person learning to use this software for the first time.

Easy-to-use and administer. Integrates easily with student information systems and SSO. We now have a way for students, faculty and staff to go to a single portal to search, find and apply to various award opportunities. This has vastly improved the overall engagement with our community.

The largest complaint, if that may be a complaint is the limited ability to customize the look and feel of the landing page for the portal. This is important as the default 'look' is quite different (primitive) from other services available online.

The accessibility of customer support, ease of implementation, and additional support provided through videos/tutorials.

I can't think of any at this time in regards to the software.

Students have a one-stop shop for all of our 36 different scholarship funds. The reviewers and selection process is much easier and friendly to use.

There is so many options/features that sometimes it seems overwhelming when building the database.

Easy to use for students and reviewers. Fairly easy to update from one year to the next. Excellent customer support.

It's not super easy for the admin to make changes to the system.