Southwestern Adventist University Partners with Awarded Software

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Our Partnership with Southwestern Adventist University

SWAU is a deeply valued partner of ours. SWAU is an institution that has seen many challenges over the years, especially with failed implementations of other software. SWAU brought Awarded on board amidst a volatile period in which they saw many key staff members - their CFO, their VP of Advancement, Director of Donor Relations and others, turn over in a short period of time. Awarded continues to meet with SWAU leadership weekly to find ways to improve scholarship matching, donor reporting and general advancement gains for the institution.

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Before Awarded: Challenges Observed

Prior to Awarded, SWAU had struggled with several scholarship management and stewardship challenges we commonly encounter in the industry, including:

• Several funds underspent or not spent at all, triggering donor inquiries and frustration
• Certain funds getting overspent, causing reconciliation issues and operating fund losses
• Students having to make enrollment decisions without knowing whether their donor funded scholarships would be renewed or not
• Negative impacts to yield and persistence due to delays in scholarship awarding and announcements
• Many donors with endowed and non-endowed funds not receiving any stewardship touchpoints due to lack of data, systems and resources

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With Awarded: Results Achieved

Despite SWAU having lost their Director of Donor Relations (and his replacement), Awarded partnered with SWAU's Director of Development and Director of Financial Aid to brainstorm, design and execute a new process using Awarded's software to revamp its scholarship management and donor fund stewardship. Together, we were able to accomplish:

• 100% fund utilization across endowed and non-endowed scholarships in the span of a couple of weeks
• Awarded automatically generated personalized impact reports for each stewardee, custom branded to SWAU's visual identity
• Students were invited onto the platform via email and text message reminders to maximize engagement and application rates
• With more centralization, we were also able to streamline the application review process, which otherwise historically had taken weeks or months with low participation rates

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Services & Support Offered

Awarded takes deep pride in working with institutions in need. SWAU has a strong sense of mission, which gets us very excited to find new opportunities for improvement and service to their organization and community. Some of these have included:

• Done-for-you data migration
• Fund auditing of donor gift agreements to identify areas of concern and opportunities to loosen donor restrictions
• Re-designed student scholarship application to boost engagement and response rates
• SMS reminders to boost applications and thank you note reception
• Automated donor impact reporting to improve fundraising and donor retention