Elevate your donor communications with our newest product, DRGrader!
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Your advancement team shouldn't need a graphic designer to steward a donor. Awarded's Donor Reporting Studio saves up to 80% of the time your team spends on reporting — no design skills, no manual data entry, no InDesign.
Advancement teams that switch to Awarded save up to 80% of the time they previously spent on donor report production — reclaiming weeks of staff time every reporting cycle
Awarded's Donor Reporting Studio auto-generates personalized, marketing-quality impact reports for every donor fund — pulling live data from your SIS, collecting student impact stories automatically, and delivering via print, email, or branded microsite. Your team approves, not assembles.
Most advancement teams spend weeks — sometimes months — manually compiling donor impact reports. Someone exports data from the SIS, someone builds a template in InDesign, someone chases students for thank-you notes, someone personalizes 400 PDFs one by one. It's skilled, intensive labor that scales poorly and leaves donors waiting.
Why Advancement Teams Switch
This page is about donor reporting — not scholarship awarding. Just the stewardship reporting workflow that most advancement teams still do entirely by hand.
Advancement teams report saving up to 80% of the time they previously spent on donor report production after switching to Awarded. The hours that used to go into exporting data, chasing students, building templates, and personalizing PDFs are replaced by a streamlined workflow where your team reviews and approves — not assembles.
InDesign reports look professional because your team invested hours in them. Awarded reports look professional because the platform auto-generates them with your custom fonts, colors, logos, and layout preferences — set up once. No InDesign license, no design expertise, no bottleneck when your designer is on leave.
The most time-consuming part of donor report production isn't design — it's chasing students for thank-you notes and impact stories. Awarded automatically sends survey requests via text and email with configurable reminders, achieving far higher response rates than manual outreach, and responses auto-populate directly into the report.
InDesign produces PDFs. Awarded produces PDFs plus branded microsites and personalized donor portals — interactive digital experiences where donors can see their scholarship's impact, fund balance, and student recipient in a trackable, shareable format. This is the "wow" moment that drives renewal giving.
InDesign can't connect a report to the original gift agreement. Awarded can. Every donor impact report is generated with full visibility into whether the fund was awarded according to the donor's original terms — giving advancement teams the confidence to answer "was this spent as intended?" without calling financial aid.
InDesign reports show what you manually type in. Awarded reports automatically pull live fund data from your SIS — award amounts, recipient counts, fund balance, GPA, major, hometown, and more — so every piece of data is accurate and current without a single copy-paste.
Most InDesign workflows produce either a print-ready PDF or a digital PDF. Awarded generates print-ready files, email-deliverable PDFs, branded microsites, and donor portal entries — all from one workflow. Match each donor's preferred delivery channel without rebuilding the report in a different format.
When report production is automated, your advancement team gets back the time they were spending on InDesign, data cleanup, and student follow-up. That time goes back to relationship-building — visiting major donors, planning events, cultivating prospects — the work that actually drives the next gift.
Feature Comparison
| Capability | Awarded Donor Reporting Studio | Adobe InDesign / Manual Process |
|---|---|---|
| Reporting time savings vs. manual process | ✓ Up to 80% time reduction | Weeks to months per cycle |
| Design skills required | ✓ None — custom branding configured once | Yes — InDesign expertise required |
| Custom branding (fonts, colors, logos, layouts) | ✓ Full custom branding | Yes — but manually applied every cycle |
| Student impact survey collection | ✓ Automated via text & email with reminders | ✗ Manual email outreach |
| Auto-populate fund data from SIS | ✓ Live data pull | ✗ Manual export and copy-paste |
| Print delivery | ✓ | Yes — but production-intensive |
| Digital email PDF delivery | ✓ Branded PDF attachments | Yes — manual send |
| Branded donor microsites | ✓ Trackable, shareable | ✗ Not possible in InDesign |
| Personalized donor portals | ✓ | ✗ |
| AI-assisted thank-you editing | ✓ | ✗ |
| Linked to gift agreement & donor intent | ✓ Compliance data visible in report | ✗ No system connection |
| Fund utilization dashboard | ✓ Real-time, shared with financial aid | ✗ Manual data assembly |
| Report review & approval workflow | ✓ Built-in commenting & approvals | ✗ Email back-and-forth |
| Multi-fund report generation | ✓ One-click for all funds | ✗ Manual, one template at a time |
| Integration with CRM (RE NXT, Salesforce) | ✓ Two-way CSV/SFTP | ✗ No native CRM connection |
| Scales to 500+ donor reports | ✓ Designed for scale | ✗ Linear effort — more reports = more hours |
The Real Workflow Difference
Awarded has taken the tedious and manual process of creating our stewardship reports and helped us create professional and sophisticated PDFs.
Devin Dougherty, Director of Stewardship & Donor Relations — Drew University
Common Questions
Our donor reports are highly customized — can Awarded really match what we produce in InDesign?
Yes — and many institutions find they're even happier with the results. Awarded's Donor Reporting Studio supports full custom branding: your fonts, colors, logos, layouts, and content modules. More importantly, Awarded uses smart templates with dynamic layout options that automatically adjust based on factors like response length, whether photos are included, and how many recipients a fund has. This means reports always look intentional and polished — not like a static template with awkward gaps. We work with your advancement team during setup, and the templates stay consistent across every fund, every cycle, without manual re-application.
We only do donor reports for 80 major donors — is Awarded worth it at that scale?
Absolutely. Awarded is highly cost-effective and generates strong ROI even at smaller volumes — because scale isn't just about the number of reports, it's about the quality, compliance integrity, and staff time behind each one. Even 80 manually-produced reports represent significant hours of data gathering, design work, and student outreach that your team doesn't need to be doing. With Awarded, those 80 reports are produced faster, delivered with more delivery options, and linked directly to your fund compliance data. For many institutions, the time savings alone pays for the platform — and the improvement in donor experience often drives meaningful renewal and upgrade giving that more than covers the investment.
How does Awarded get the student impact stories into the reports?
Awarded offers a mobile-optimized student portal that recipients log into via SSO — no account creation, no registration, no password to remember. Students simply click a link and land directly in their personalized submission experience. Awarded automatically sends those links via text and email with configurable reminder sequences. Responses are collected in the platform, can be AI-assisted for tone and editing, reviewed and approved by your team, and then auto-populate directly into the corresponding donor report — no copy-paste, no inbox hunting.
What are donor microsites and why do they matter?
A donor microsite is a personalized, branded web page created automatically for each donor fund — showing the student recipient's story, the fund's impact, and the donor's giving history in a trackable digital experience. Donors can share their microsite and revisit it throughout the year, feeling connected to their scholarship in a way a PDF attachment rarely achieves. That said, microsites are one option among several — most institutions still lead with PDFs, and many are increasingly adding digital delivery formats to better meet their donors where they are. Awarded supports whichever combination works for your program.
How is this different from a CRM?
CRMs don't do what Awarded does — and Awarded doesn't try to replace your CRM. Awarded works alongside all industry-standard advancement CRMs, including Raiser's Edge, Salesforce, Ascend, AffinaQuest, Virtuous, Slate, and others. The capabilities that are unique to Awarded include: collecting surveys and impact submissions from students, fund managers, and beneficiaries; streamlining the review and approval of those responses; and generating dynamic, personalized, highly branded endowment reports, stewardship reports, and impact reports. Like CRMs, Awarded can send completed reports out via email on your behalf — or, if you prefer, Awarded handles all the collection, compilation, and packaging work and you continue sending from within your CRM. Either way, the manual, time-consuming production work is what Awarded eliminates.
"Awarded has been a game changer. They feel like partners in our work."
Attract & retain more students and donors starting today.
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