Brown University

Replacing a Legacy System to Streamline Scholarship Matching Across Campus

When Brown University's Division of Advancement set out to modernize how it managed more than 1,500 scholarships, medical scholarships, and fellowships, the stakes were high. The existing system was cumbersome, inflexible, and required significant manual effort to maintain. The team needed a platform that could standardize and streamline matching across departments — and scale with the university's ambitions.

Brown selected Awarded to replace its legacy scholarship system, and a three-person project team — Alyssa Wilcox, Senior Business Analyst; Sarah Justus, Senior Stewardship Reporting Officer; and Mamdouh Elanai, Lead Report Developer — led the implementation.

The results were immediate. During the initial rollout, Brown saw a 25% reduction in the time required to conduct scholarship matches, along with significant cost savings. The platform created a single source of truth for scholarship data across Advancement, OIT, and campus partners — eliminating fragmented systems and dramatically improving data integrity.

The impact went beyond efficiency. The project team was recognized with Brown's 2025 Excellence Award for Efficiency (Brown's highest staff recognition), with nominators citing the team's ability to build consensus, standardize processes, and set a new standard for cross-functional technology projects at the university.

"Before the Awarded software platform, our scholarship matching process was, to put it politely, a hurdle. This team didn't just clear that hurdle: they removed it. They navigated complex data systems across Advancement, OIT, and our campus partners to create a single source of truth for more than 1,500 scholarships, medical scholarships, and fellowships."

— Sara Emmenecker, Division of Advancement, Brown University

"Their work has significantly increased our data integrity. And just as importantly, our donor confidence."

— Sara Emmenecker, Division of Advancement, Brown University