TL;DR : Students that are verified and launched by partnering universities are not required to raise 100% of their scholarship to be deemed successful. The amount raised within 30 days will be awarded to the student, prioritising their fees (which we will send directly to the university). Should they raise more than their fees, the remaining will be awarded to them for their stipend. ——- Skolafund, by default, has an All-or-Nothing Policy for all students that wish to crowdfund their scholarship on our platform. This policy requires students to meet 100% of the amount they target for their scholarship campaign, for it to be deemed successful. If not, the sponsors will have a choice for a refund or to sponsor another student’s scholarship. We introduced this – after consulting our mentors and a group of initial sponsors and supporters – due to these reasons:
- We received a lot of applications, in our earlier days, from students who were not serious in their application, who just wished to “try their luck”. They filled up the form with one-liners in hopes that a random sponsor will just give them some money. It takes time and effort to sort out serious and non-serious applications. To discourage non-serious students from applying, we agreed that having this in place would help.
- To promote transparency between sponsors and students. By sponsoring on Skolafund, other sponsors will know how much more is needed by the student and can make a better decision with regards to the amount to sponsor. This is in contrast to making a bank transfer to the student directly, where other sponsors are left unaware of the amount that has been raised and the balance needed. By introducing this policy, it encourages students and sponsors to utilise the platform and make things more transparency.
- Lastly, almost related to the first point, we wish to minimise the chances of someone starting a fraud campaign. Apart from promising that all money raised for fees will be sent directly to the university and checking documents, we feel that by having this policy in place, it’ll discourage further bad people from starting a fake campaign (because it takes lots of effort to make a campaign successful).
However, we’ve received multiple feedback from concerned sponsors and we totally agree that for a majority of the students that have launched a scholarship campaign on our platform, any amount they raise would be helpful to them. We’ve been trying to figure out a plan to remove this policy without compromising the three issues above and we’ve found a plan that we would like to pilot: Partnering with Universities. We will now try to get partnerhsips with universities to verify and launch campaigns coming from their respective university. By doing this, we can address problems number 1 and 3 (if you have suggestions for point no. 2, do share with us!). Partnering universities can quickly check against their database to confirm that the applicants are students there, confirm their inputs and do interviews if necessary. Once everything has been verified, the campaign can be launched and be exempted from our All-or-Nothing rule. We are in talks with some universities currently (Admin department/Student Council) to work out a partnership. A university that has agreed to pilot this with us is Cyberjaya University! Hence, students from Cyberjaya University that launch a scholarship campaign on Skolafund will be awarded with scholarship regardless of the amount raised! We look forward to partnering with more universities. If you’d like to see this happen in your university, do share with your Admin Office or Student Council (SRC/MPP) and get them to email us at [email protected]. 🙂