Financial Aid Season is Coming! Prepare with these Tips and Tricks

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Don't look now, but Financial Aid Season is coming! To better help you prepare, we've put together some tips, tricks, and things to consider during your preparations.

Financial Aid season is right around the corner, and we have a few tips to help you make it a successful one!

Establish goals that are in line with your budget

You may start thinking about your Financial Aid goals before the budget has been finalized. As decisions are made and the application period approaches, it’s important to work with your Finance and Admissions teams to ensure all departments are on the same page. For example, the Admissions team may need to reevaluate its goal of increasing socioeconomic diversity by utilizing Financial Aid if the Finance team plans to reduce the Financial Aid budget.

Review and document your policies and procedures

Creating a Financial Aid guide or manual to document your policies and protocols will help ensure financial aid is awarded fairly year over year and from one family to the next. Revisit and update your guide regularly to build a go-to resource that your team and families will appreciate having as various situations and circumstances arise.

For more information on building a Financial Aid manual, check out our How to Create a Financial Aid Manual blog post. We also have a Financial Aid Policy Manual (attached) created by our friends at Mission Enrollment that some of you may remember seeing during our User Conference.

Review communications

You will likely review your communication templates and web pages each year to update due dates and annual information. This is also a great time to assess your content and how you share it with families. For example:

Are there questions you get frequently that are not included in your FAQ?
Are you overlooking returning families by limiting Financial Aid information to the Admissions pages on your website?
Are families consistently failing to meet deadlines because you’re not communicating early and often enough?
Are your communications clear and consistent?
Are all the links to and from your Financial Aid landing page functional and pointing to the correct resources?

Host a Financial Aid Night

You can save your Financial Aid team and your families a lot of time and headaches by hosting a Financial Aid Night. You may consider hosting it virtually to allow and encourage more families to attend by making it anonymous. Plan for 45 minutes to walk attendees through the application process and share the most common mistakes families tend to make along the way. It will improve the quality of information you receive and reduce the number of appeals you must handle down the road.

That's all for now, but we encourage all of you to share your ideas and tips for a successful Financial Aid season in the comments! Thanks for reading and we'll see you right back here next week for the highly anticipated September recap.

News Blackbaud K-12 Solutions™ Blog 09/27/2022 9:00am EDT

Added by Derek Nichols

1 Comments

Dmitro Makovetskiy Mar '23

Thanks for the useful info