Overview
Western Washington University’s Fellowships office works with undergraduate and graduate students to prepare them for nationally competitive scholarships and fellowships. The Fellowships Office promotes awareness of various external funding opportunities, while helping to support the application process by providing writing support, interview preparation and general advisement of the process.
Goal
The site was on an older WordPress platform that required manual efforts to maintain the ever-growing, and increasingly dynamic list of fellowships. We choose to migrate the site to Drupal to increase the flexibility and capabilities of displaying available fellowships and scholarships. In addition, Drupal's ability to use content types and views would reduce the maintenance efforts of site editors and help achieve accuracy of information allowing students an easier way to find and apply for funding. They also wanted to feature students who applied for and won these prestigious scholarships to encourage other students to apply.
Strategy
We created two content types to help sort and display information in multiple ways. This included a scholarships content type (to display background information, requirements and links to various scholarship opportunities) and a Western Winners content type (to display past awardees of scholarships).
Results
Scholarships are easily added to the system by granting agency, with specifics for each. The scholarships are automatically sorted and listed both alphabetically and by deadline date, allowing for students to immediately see scholarship opportunities with upcoming deadlines on the home page.