No application required: a new home for Scholarships
Scholarships are potentially life changing for for students. They’re also a critical tool used by Universities to attract the best and brightest minds.
Over almost 200 years, the University of Melbourne’s scholarship pool had grown from a wonderful dream to an administrative nightmare.
The problem
Historically, scholarships at UoM could be held and awarded by any department or even an individual staff member. The potential pool had grown past 2000 award types, all with different selection criteria, application dates and owners.
The central Scholarships office controlled less than a third of available funding; they simply didn’t know how many others existed. And many scholarships could not be awarded because they were legally questionable (one could only be awarded to a white male Protestant flute player…) or because they were never advertised.
As a result, most high achieving prospective students believed that Melbourne was the least generous of all Australian Universities, and were simply not applying to Melbourne courses.
The issues were complex. Students were losing out on money they needed and deserved; hundreds of staff members had an extra administrative burden to manage; the University was losing out on potential talent.
As the Recruitment marketing lead, what made all of this extra painful was that the outdated Scholarships website represented a huge %age of all the University’s traffic. It should have been the ultimate lead generator.
The timeline
My team had an additional challenge: Open Day. In just four short months, the University would open its doors for the biggest recruitment moment of the year. VCE results would be released shortly after, and by December the minds of potential students would largely be made up.
If we were going to fix this, we could either wait another year - or move fast.
The plan
We needed to set out across the University to find all the scholarships and pull them together. Then coordinate a major marketing campaign so that students could understand the full breadth and depth of the University’s offering.
The dream was that students could immediately see all the scholarships that applied to them - including the many, many scholarships for which no application would be required. If they got into a UoM course, and given their particular circumstances, what might we just… give them?
The list looked something like this:
Find the scholarships. A genuine task in itself - some were literally filed in professors’ cabinets.
Build a taxonomy. Could we make syntactic sense of these different offers somehow?
UX: align our database and taxonomy with real student searches.
Clean house! Some of the work was going to have to go back to teams like Legal. This was a great moment for the University to clean up, and the pressure of Open Day was the year’s best motivating force.
Create a user-friendly back end and soft-onboard early adopters. We decided to make onboarding easy, so that any staff member could upload a scholarship. And for many of our premium scholarships, we input the info ourselves.
Feed the full search experience: pull this information into Course Search, course guides, Open Day experiences and advertising.
The approach
A lot of this had to happen in tandem, and my existing team was going in to Open Day overdrive. I engaged a research team (the BCorp legends at Today Design) and appointed one outstanding team member as dedicated project manager.
Together, we conducted user needs testing to determine how, when and why students search for funding.
While Today worked with students to find out what they asked and needed, my team:
Onboarded critical stakeholders in person
Ran internal workshops to show the value of the project, and student feedback
Cleared data irregularities
Worked with Legal to make outdated scholarships awardable; and ultimately
No Application Required
When Open Day arrived, we had 600 legally cleared, data-cleaned, awardable scholarships in the database.
https://scholarships.unimelb.edu.au/
The database was ready to act as a critical recruitment tool; students could input their email address to receive custom listings.
Spotlighted ‘prestige’ scholarships brought life to the depth of Melbourne’s offering:
And our phenomenal web team was able to match the newly ‘clean’ database to the University's key Course Search pages.
That’s incredibly important, because it means that a student looking for a course of any kind can easily see that there’s a host of options ready for someone like them - no matter who they are and where they’ve come from.
Last but not least... with Coursesearch upgraded, my team was able to pull current and cross checked information into a suite of print materials for events, including a standalone brochure and Scholarships material woven through all of our course guides.
The Scholarships site is now a single source of truth for students - and for staff.
Lessons learned
The humans matter
People want the best, but not always on ‘your’ terms. Tell a great story about what you want to do, and tell it over and again, one on one and in groups and in every project update. Tell it till you know it backwards and forwards and in and out.
University projects need to be attractive as an opt-in proposition, and demonstrate student-first values.
Expect the unexpected
A University-sized data set can throw some major curve balls. A very strong stakeholder network and a collaborative, learning-oriented mindset goes a long way!
Plan for world domination
Successful projects at Universities can scale very quickly if adopted. What could go right? What good things could be done if it all works out?
What it made possible
The work didn’t stop there. At the time of writing, there are 1200 scholarships in the database, being offered and awarded every year. UoM gives away a lot more money - a big win!
And two years later, high achiever research rated the University as one of Australia’s most desirable destinations.
https://scholarships.unimelb.edu.au/
People who made this possible:
The incredible team at Today Design
Sunni Cooper - data wrangler, student advocate, and stakeholder charmer extraordinaire.
Anthony Mannering - and his team of student-centric engineering legends. They wove a special kind of magic on our very complex data, and made it sing.
