Product Review of SmarterSelect

SmarterSelect provides a comprehensive, easy-to-use, online application management solution for scholarships, grants, awards, fellowships, data collection, and more. You can create, collect, analyze, and evaluate applications using SmarterSelect’s mobile-responsive user interface, text message notifications, inline calculations, dynamic application rules, online recommendations, and file uploads.
Website: https://www.smarterselect.com/
What Users Love About the App
“Smarter Select is an easy-to-use platform that meets many needs for our organization. We can easily and quickly create custom applications for our variety of grant and scholarship programs.”
“Because application data can be easily exported into a csv/spreadsheet file, it is easy to upload to our database management system, which saves me countless hours of data entry. When I have had issues in the past, their support staff have been amazingly responsive.”
“I appreciate their focus on education. Their free webinars have made it easy for me to understand the software’s capabilities and new features and upgrades. All around, I’m a big fan of Smarter Select and would not be able to do my job as efficiently or easy without it!”
“SmarterSelect allowed us to take our manual paper process to an incredibly efficient, streamlined, paperless approach. Since implementation we have increased our application submissions by over 400%.”
“I love the new features and how easy it is to contact/update applicants. Creating our own blast emails and having the capability to edit pre-formatted ones also helps us with our unique application process.”
What Users Dislike About the App
“The ONLY reason I might consider another software is for the integration aspect. Our Foundant and Blackbaud have similar products but the edge they bring is the ability to integrate with our accounting software.”
“The user interface feels very slow and clunky. It’s not super intuitive. For example, when creating an application form, I assume I can just edit by clicking on what I see, but in order to actually edit a section, I have to click through the sections on the right hand side first, and that doesn’t seem very intuitive.”
“I wish we could create our own statuses that would allow us to do specific autoscoring. For example, one of the things we need to do is make sure that the applicants have submitted the correct attachments.”
“The learning curve is there – it takes a while to get the knack of things. And setting up the application and revising it to be exactly what you want can be cumbersome.”
“I wish I could archive deleted programs so that I don’t have to sort through them, without losing the applications completely. I would just like to move the ones I know I will probably never need again out of the “disabled” section and only keep the ones from the past year or two in that section.”