The Pittsburg Foundation

I would tell another organization considering Foundant to talk to the users, talk to us, there are a lot of us. We can really explain the pros, cons, and the benefits to think about. We can explain the ways that we're using Foundant. I would say to use that built-in Foundant Family.

Features

Since we get thousands of applications in Foundant’s Scholarship Solution, the batch feature has been the biggest time-saver. Being able to batch email applicants has been helpful too, because we like to remind our applicants every week to submit their application by the due date. Being able to batch evaluations and send those to a group or batch approvals, denials, and closing them are all helpful. You can tell I really like the batch feature because it has been a lifesaver. To go through each item one at a time would take another staff member.

The email function has also been a big time-saver. I like that they go hand-in-hand. It's nice to be able to email students from one portal and get them the information they need in a timely manner.

Transition

We do everything in Foundant’s Scholarship Solution. We have 350 scholarship funds, but half of them are in this electronic format while the other half are still on paper so we're working through that. We did a bulk of our scholarship processes transition in one year so even though it's a slow transition (it was a lot of processes to transfer) Foundant helped us, which was great. We're a small team and timewise we would have never been able to do 170 applications without help from Foundant. Anytime you're making changes such as implementing processes, there's going to be some bumps. I think there was some resistance because we have done everything on paper for so long, and it was processed very effectively by the person who was there before me. But we could not continue with that because we get more applications every year, so there's no way to handle that process as it grows. This is really the only way, we get thousands of applications, so I mean… this is it.