One of the most useful tools for scholarship administrators is the Award & Deny screen, a tab where you can examine applicant data, apply filters, and decide who receives funds.
The screen streamlines the award process while giving you confidence that decisions are data-driven, fair, and transparent.
Overview
Navigate to Scholarships > Award & Deny tab in the secondary menu.
The Award & Deny screen centralizes applicant data in one intuitive place, making it easy for administrators to review, compare, and award scholarships. With flexible filters, sortable columns, and customizable views, it supports fair, consistent decisions, whether you're managing a small fund or a large applicant pool.
This guide will give you an overview of how to navigate and use the screen effectively.
Let's dive into the details:
Applicant table: The page provides administrators with a consolidated table of all students who applied for a particular scholarship.
Each row represents an applicant and displays their Award and Deny buttons, name, the average reviewer score, and amount awarded this cycle, plus any other columns you add.Column Settings: Use the Columns button to customize the applicant table by choosing which data points to display and in what order.
You can include any profile information (e.g., Student ID, email) or question responses (e.g., GPA, major, financial need). This allows you to focus on the most relevant details for your review process and streamline comparisons across applicants.
Expand Applicant Details: Click an applicant's name to open the applicant panel, with tabs for the student's Application, Review, Notes, and SpringIQ results. Use the Notes tab for internal notes and flags about the applicant.
Certain questions can be pinned and will appear at the top of the response list for every applicant within the scholarship, ensuring consistent visibility and access to the most relevant data.Note: Pinned application questions are specific to the scholarship they’re pinned to.
Scholarship Notes Sidebar: Click Scholarship Notes beside the page heading to open this collapsible sidebar, which shows important scholarship details like the scholarship description, internal notes, and qualifications to guide your decisions.
Filtering applicants: Click Filters to open the Filter Settings dialog, choose a field from the Filter by dropdown, and see what is currently applied in the Applied Filters panel.
Custom filters narrow the candidate list to the applicants who meet specific criteria. For example, administrators can filter to show only students majoring in engineering, those with GPAs above 3.5, or applicants who demonstrate financial need. Multiple filters can be combined.
Sorting: Click any column header to sort the table. For example, sorting by Score shows top-scoring students, while sorting by $ Awarded this Cycle highlights those who’ve received little or no funding, making it easy to spot top candidates or those with the greatest need.
Full Screen View: For better readability, you can always expand the table area by clicking the Toggle navigation icon
Awarding
Before finalizing decisions:
You may leave internal notes to document rationale or internal feedback for your team. Applicant notes live on the Notes tab of the applicant panel: Scholarship Notes apply to that student for this scholarship, and Global Profile Notes are visible across all cycles and scholarships. You can also add short flags, such as Strong essay, to help you remember a student. The scholarship's own internal notes are in the Scholarship Notes panel.
Once ready, update an applicant’s status to either Award or Deny.
Click a status button to toggle it on or off. Select Award to mark an applicant for funding, or Deny if they won’t be selected. Click the same button again to undo the decision and return them to a neutral state.
Note: Changing an applicant’s status in this tab does not notify the student. Publish the award status with Publish Awards on the Distribution tab, and email students from the Notify tab.
Funds distribution and Award status publishing
After you've selected your awarded applicants on the Award & Deny tab, click the Distribution tab to:
Indicate a dollar amount to award each applicant
Publish/Unpublish the award status
Fund distribution
On this page, you'll see a list of all the students you've awarded, with the individual award amount in the left column.
If a scholarship has a total amount and a number of awards entered, the system splits the funds evenly. You can also click Award Evenly to split the funds evenly across your awarded applicants.
Note: If you don't want to award all applicants evenly, you can adjust the individual award amounts manually. You cannot, however, exceed the scholarship's Total Funds amount.
If you accidentally try to award more dollars than you've allocated for this opportunity, you'll see a warning message. Either reduce the individual award amounts or increase the Total Funds amount on the Details tab.
To help you track how many dollars you have left to award, three amounts are surfaced at the top:
Distributed—the total of the individual awards you've entered so far
Available—the unawarded amount, calculated in real time based on the total minus all the individual awards you've entered
Total—the Total Funds amount from the Details tab
Publish Awards
Near the upper right corner of the page is the Publish Awards button:
When you click the button to "publish" the award status:
Each awarded student will see a banner notification stating that they were awarded.
Students' statuses will update from Applied to Awarded in their scholarship list (for the appropriate scholarship only).
The individual award amount will be displayed on their dashboard.
If you've configured any post-award follow-up questions for this scholarship, those items are generated and will be visible on the awarded applicant's dashboard.
After the award status has been published, you may "unpublish" it to return to a hidden state. When a scholarship is published, the publish button will read Hide Scholarships.
Hiding a scholarship’s status closes all associated post-award items in the cycle, regardless of whether students have submitted.
Note: To open post-award items, go to Tasks > Scholarship Tasks, click the follow-up item, and click Reopen follow-up.
Some additional notes about publishing the award status:
Students are not automatically emailed when you publish the scholarship status; they only see status updates on their dashboard. You can email them from the Notify tab.
It is not required that you publish the award status. You can award students and notify them by email without publishing the status.
Note: If you have After Awarding additional requirements configured, such as a thank-you letter upload, you must publish the status to generate those items for students.
What happens once you publish the award status?
This should be done after you’ve selected recipients for a given scholarship and distributed award amounts to each awardee (to learn more, see Distribute Dollars to Awarded Applicants & Publish Award Status).
Publishing a scholarship’s award status results in two things happening:
The award decision is displayed on the student dashboard along with post-award items.
The statuses for all scholarships are displayed in the Scholarships tab.
Admins can access follow-up items from the Tasks > Scholarship Tasks tab.
