Case Studies

Community Foundation Creates Powerful Scholarship Program

Is one person in your foundation performing a critical role, the responsibilities of which are not even known to others? Then you might appreciate this foundation’s success story.

Situation

As a primary scholarship provider in the state, this foundation wanted to continue expanding their program. At the same time, calls were coming in from students, parents, fundholders, and schools that were not being answered within the 24 hours the foundation expected. As a result, these important stakeholders were not receiving the level of service they needed, and staff members were on edge. Therefore, the foundation decided to hold off on program growth until this ongoing problem could be resolved.

Solution

This foundation engaged Lee Kuntz to help them allocate responsibilities in a more efficient manner. Lee led a small employee team through four hours of process transformation training and then led a virtual deep dive to redesign their scholarship operations.

During the deep dive, the project team learned that the scholarship officer was about the only person doing scholarship work in the entire foundation. This officer talked to donors, drafted written communications, facilitated selection committees, authorized payments, and responded to all phone calls and emails. Given this all-encompassing role, only the scholarship officer could appropriately respond to stakeholders’ questions. But the officer was so overloaded handling the entire scholarship program that she could not return calls and emails in a timely fashion.

Results

With coaching, this foundation created an integrated team process and roles approach that will deliver scholarships faster, producing a better experience for fundholders, volunteer scholarship committees, and scholarship recipients. The foundation’s CFO said after the deep dive: “The coached redesign approach was amazing. I can’t believe in the short time we had, Lee was able to guide us to create a plan which will enable us to make significant improvements in a few months.”

If this sounds familiar, contact Lee Kuntz to talk about what you see happening at your organization and about the outcomes your organization needs to be successful.