Taking advantage of Sleek’s QSS™ (Quick Start Suites), Texas State Technical College Foundation launches a self-service scholarship portal, optimizing the scholarship application process for students and advancement staff alike.

Supporting the Texas’ Future Workforce

Texas State Technical College (TSTC) supports Texas’ educational and economic growth by offering specialized programs, emphasizing advanced technical and vocational areas for certificates and degrees. It’s essential job training for the future workforce. 

The TSTC Foundation’s role is to support the college’s programs and students. One key kind of support comes from scholarships. Last year alone, they raised $3.5 million in scholarship funds and awarded 1,345 scholarships to make technical training possible for students in financial need. 

A Vision and a Metamorphosis

The TSTC Foundation’s Director of Gift Administration, Tara W., is in charge of managing applications to and awards for some 50 scholarships. Until recently, she relied on spreadsheets. It was time-consuming and stressful.

Most of the scholarships have set criteria that determine which students are eligible to receive aid. For many, awardees must be enrolled in a specific program at a specific campus. Some are reserved for first-years, others for returning students. When an application cycle opened, many students cast a wide net. They applied to as many scholarships as they could, hoping that despite what the eligibility requirements said, they could maximize their chances of getting funding. 

This meant that for Tara and her team, each cycle brought a massive list of applications that had to be manually reviewed and often excluded simply because the student didn’t fit the right profile. Only once the applications were narrowed down to those that were actually eligible could they be shared with the review committee. All the while, Tara’s team was bombarded by questions from their pool of applicants. “Did you get my application?” “When will I hear if I’ve been awarded a scholarship?” “When will I receive my award money?”

The TSTC Foundation’s migration to Salesforce changed everything. Tara had an idea. Since the eligibility requirements of most scholarships are static, why couldn’t they build a system that would eliminate (or prevent) all those ineligible applicants? It’d be a lot better for students, too, if they didn’t waste time applying for scholarships they were never eligible for in the first place.

The TSTC Foundation decided to take advantage of Sleek’s QSS™27 for Scholarship Management to actualize this vision. With a series of objects designed for tracking funding programs, a starter template for a fund seeker portal, and a series of QSS™ trainings to make it make sense, Tara’s team was equipped to manage scholarships within their CRM—the same system that handles their fundraising, engagement, stewardship, and pretty much everything else. Next, they partnered with Sleek’s business analysts and developers to expand on the out-of-the-box functionality with custom components. 

The Fall 2023 application cycle was different. This time, applications only came in from eligible students. With students logging into a self-service portal to apply and check the status of their applications, Tara’s team could spend less time providing updates to anxious students and focus on getting applications reviewed and awards sent out. 

Taking the Application Process into Our Own Hands

From the perspective of the TSTC student applying for aid, the Fall 2023 semester was also different. Logging into a new portal (beautifully branded with TSTC’s logo and colors on Experience Cloud) for the first time, she registers herself by answering a few basic questions about herself: which campus she’s enrolled at, which program she’s going for, and her GPA. Next, she gets a list of scholarships. It’s a shorter list than she’s seen before, because the system has automatically filtered out the scholarships that don’t match her campus, academic program, or student profile. 

Once our student has clicked on an available scholarship and submitted an application, she gets an automated email to let her know it’s been received. The email also reminds her that she can log in to the scholarship portal whenever she wants to check the status of her applications. When applications proceed to the review stage, she gets another email. And finally, when a decision is made, the system lets her know immediately that she’s been selected with a congratulatory letter. 

Not only are students saved from submitting applications that might get disqualified simply based on preset criteria, but they’re also empowered to stay on top of their own requests for funding on a transparent platform. The experience is modern, efficient, and smooth. 

How Does Change Happen?

The TSTC Foundation’s story exemplifies the power of visionary leadership combined with a state-of-the-art platform like QSS™ for Salesforce.

QSS™ (Quick Start Suites) for Salesforce: A collection of implementation packages for higher education and nonprofit organizations looking to move onto a modern system for managing fundraising, engagement, membership, programs, and more. With over 13,000 hours invested in developing and refining our quick start suites, you can be sure that your Salesforce instance will have industry best practices baked in. Each QSS™ comes with the training and resources you need for a low-stress and successful transition, plus the technical support you need to fully personalize your CRM.

When you implement QSS™ on Salesforce, you get a unique platform with out-of-the-box functionality to handle your business process. It’s also flexible enough that you can enhance it and mold it to your unique needs. A QSS™ implementation also means that a team of certified administrators and developers can support you and help turn your vision into a fine-tuned machine. That’s why it can be so important to engage an implementation partner like Sleek for your journey onto a new system!

In TSTC’s case, they knew what they needed and they knew their new CRM could get them there. Once our business analysts and developers understood the use case, we developed custom components for user registration and scholarship matching. In line with Sleek’s philosophy, everything was built in a way that TSTC could take ownership of it and manage the bespoke system internally. Processes are documented and handed off to the right team.

It’s easy to underestimate the value of having your scholarship management system on the same platform that handles all of your other advancement processes. TSTC’s scholarship portal does more than facilitate applications and awards for funding; it produces data. Ten, twenty years in the future, it’ll be easy to see on donor’s record when they were awarded a scholarship, which scholarship, and for how much. Stewardship efforts also gain a boost—more on that below. 

What’s Next for the TSTC Foundation?

In terms of user experience, the Fall 2023 scholarship cycle changed things dramatically for both Tara and her team and for TSTC’s scholarship applicants. The number of applications decreased, but that’s a good thing. The applications that were going to have to be manually excluded never got created. Time saved for everybody. 

With application data flowing into Salesforce as well as detailed tracking of who is awarded how much, there’s new possibilities for reporting to donors on the impact of their contributions. An innovative and highly motivated team like TSTC always has their eyes on the future, and now they’re turning their attention to stewardship. When they’re ready to send major donors in-depth reports on the students that have benefitted from scholarship funds, Salesforce and Sleek have them covered!