Creating a Scholarship
The two videos below show how to start and pick scholarship winners on Atila. This page also contains text and pictures outlining the steps in the video.
This video demo outlines the main steps involved in starting a scholarship on Atila.
This video demo outlines the main steps in picking managing the applications and picking a winner for your scholarship.
Video Summary
- Make an account
- Enter scholarship details
- Create Scholarship-specific questions
- Enter payment method
- Scholarship contributions on Atila
How does it Work?
- Visit the add a scholarship page
- Enter details about the scholarship such as the name of the scholarship, who is eligible, the story behind why you started the scholarship, the deadline, funding amount, questions for the applicants, etc. 3. Fund your scholarship. Optional: Others can contribute to the scholarship as well 4. Pick finalists and Atila reviews finalists 5. Pick winner, Atila reviews winner, winner writes thank you letter and receives funds
How much does it Cost?
1. The cost of sponsoring a scholarship on Atila is 9% of the scholarship amount. This fee is added to the scholarship amount. 2. For example, you start a scholarship for $100. You pay an additional $9 (9%*$100) and $1.17 in HST (13% of the $9 fee). The total cost of your scholarship would be $110.17, student receives the full $100, Atila receives $9 and, $1.17 is paid as tax. 3. More Information can be found on the pricing page.
What does the Atila fee cover?
Some of the things the Atila fee covers include:
- A portion is reinvested in sponsoring more scholarships
- Payment processing fees
- Marketing and sales to get more sponsors to start scholarships and students to apply
- Website hosting and server costs
How we help YOU promote!
When the scholarship is live, Atila will help you promote your scholarship to our network of over 100 schools and student organizations. For example, we have students interested in everything from creative writing to STEM.
For example, we reached out to AIS Laurier and Carleton University Ski and Snow Club and they agreed to share our Atila Justice for Indian Farmers Scholarship and the Skateboards for Hope Scholarship on their social media pages and share it with their club members.
What is the minimum amount to start a scholarship?
A scholarship can be started for $50 and you can contribute to existing scholarships for $10. Atila's vision is democratizing access to education funding. This means making it easier for students to find scholarships. It also means making it easier for people to support students. Starting a scholarship typically requires thousands of dollars. This creates a barrier to entry for people who want to start a scholarship, but don’t have the money to start an endowment. By making it very easy and affordable for anyone to start a scholarship, more people are able to make a positive impact and help more students.
Can Other people Contribute to a Scholarship?
Anyone can contribute to an existing scholarship for as little as $10. So if you decide to start a scholarship; your family, friends, colleagues at work, kind strangers on the internet, etc. can contribute to the scholarship.
Picking a Winner
After you've created a scholarship the next step is picking a winner. Which consists of the following steps:
- Invite collaborators
- Message all the applicants
- Review and score applications
- Pick finalists
- Select a winner
Summary
The scholarship sponsor reviews the applications and picks the finalists and winners. If you want help filtering the applications, Atila will help you review the applications, present you a narrowed down list of the top applications and then you can pick the winner. There is no additional cost for this service.
- Students submit applications: Submitted applications can start being graded as applications are sent in.
- Deadline passes
- Scholarship Sponsor and Atila have 7 days to score the existing applications and pick a winner. Scores are used internally, to help reviewers track and rank applications, these scores are not shown to students.
- Finalists are chosen: Usually around 5-10 applications are chosen as finalists. Finalists must submit proof of enrollment, a recent transcript and complete the security verification step.
- Winner is selected and has 7 days to verify proof of enrollment and write a thank you letter to the sponsor. Once that is complete, funds are transferred to the student within 24 hours.
Invite Collaborators
To help you review and manage your applications you can invite people to help you review and score applications.
Message Applicants
You can send an announcement or update to all the applicants to a scholarship directly through the applications management interface with the click of a button.
You can also filter your message to only go out to a segment of the applicants. For example, you can send a message to all applicants, submitted applications only, finalists only, finalists excluding the winner and more.
Automatic Messages
There are also some messages that will be automatically sent to applicants:
- 7 days and 24 hours before a scholarship is due all unsbumitted applications will receive a reminder to submit their applications.
- After the finalists have been picked, all applicants will be notified both if they were and if they were not selected as a finalist.
- Once the winner has been picked and completed their verification process all finalists are notified.
Reviewing Applications
If you have invited others to collaborate with you on a scholarship with you, you can automatically assign each person to review a subset of the applications and choose how many reviewers will be assigned to each application.
We recommend using the 2+ 1 system, where each application gets at least 2 reviewers and if there is a score difference of 2.1 or more it gets assigned to a 3rd person for review. Once all the applications have been scored, you pick the top 5-10 as finalists for them to complete the verification step.
