A few of us on staff at College Confidential get emails out of the blue asking us to promote some scholarship or another. A recent example, which I won’t link to here, was from a company that sells mobility scooters and electric wheelchairs. They give $1000 every semester to the winner of an essay contest. The were hoping for us to link to their site from the Outside Scholarships forum or our scholarship search page.
One way of thinking is that this is a win all around:
students get extra money for college,
the sponsoring company gets a little publicity,
the community gets to make those connections and
the site gets a little more useful content.
Another way of thinking is that most unsolicited email has an ulterior motive and I just don’t know what that is yet.
So I’d like to get some help figuring out what I should be looking at when evaluating scholarships to promote on College Confidential.
If it’s related to a business…and seems to be promoting the business…i would say…no.
There have been a number of posts here (deleted) claiming to offer free money to college students. When the links were opened (by people with a higher pay grade than mine), they were really spam.
I think the best way is to ignore unsolicited emails of this type.
Until recently, I was a financial aid director. I rarely shared scholarship opportunities that were sent to me (unless they were from organizations I knew to be legitimate). So many are really just marketing ploys. I always investigated the scholarship before promoting it.
To be honest, I don’t think you should promote scholarship opportunities on CC.
When I worked in marketing, I was on teams that advertised via many ways including collegiate sporting tournaments, non-sporting collegiate events, and yes, scholarships.
One way to discern the blatant marketing ploy from the actual intent to help students is to ask how many scholarships the company is paying out.
If a company is paying out 100 scholarships of $1,000 each, that is worth distributing to a larger audience. If the company is paying out a single $500 scholarship, they don’t need your help for that. They can contact guidance counselors at high schools within a 20-mile radius of their headquarters and find many suitable students.
Even the 100x$1,000 offer may be a blatant marketing ploy, but at least that offers some advantages of scale to the applicants. A company awarding a single $500 scholarship by trying to reach and encourage 100,000 student applicants is much more interested in generating a low-cost marketing grift than actually helping college students.
there are several national scholarship sites with links to national scholarships, all searchable with filters. I can see this a somewhat of a draw to HS students if you were to have a scholarship section; however I think it’d be a lot of work to keep it accurate and with deadlines and working links and etc. You’d have to figure if it was worth it to you. so many ideas: you could have a featured scholarship each month, or even a CC scholarship.
I’m investigating if there is any reason to keep the Sallie Mae list, which seems like a way to harvest data and I don’t think CC gets any benefit. I’d love to get some feedback on the copy. I’m also passing it around internally to get some suggestions from people on staff who know more about this than I do.
Currently it’s the only thing on [this page](https://www.collegeconfidential.com/resources/scholarship-search). We get some traffic there, so I’m hoping to avoid sending people off to submit their data to some other organization. Unless there’s something I’m missing, I’m going to just leave Sallie Mae out of it.
