Project Scholarship

Project Scholarship is developing an online marketplace that is a Win for Students, a Win for College and Universities and a Win For Companies. It can be seen at Projectscholarship.org.

The way it works is that any company can "CrowdSource" a predefined project to CURRENT or POTENTIAL college students. The projects are designed to be a sampling of "real-world" tasks that companies need to be done every day yet are often "outsource" to overseas providers because they do not need to hire anyone full time for this type of project. Project Scholarship allows the students to perform tasks and enter submit they results as the application for the "micro-scholarship". The more time consuming the task is the greater the overall micro-scholarship is.

Every project awards a first, second and third place winner. awarded to winners to increase the number of students winning scholarships. The student's bank the micro-scholarships over the course of the semester or until they are ready to attend school. The students can then "withdraw" the scholarship bank in the form of a check to a nonprofit accredited US only College or University.

Win for Students - These quick-hitting projects or tasks allow the students to practice real-world skills and build there resume while in school. Most important every dollar is scholarships is one less dollar that the student needs to borrow helping to alleviate our nations Student Debt Crisis.

Win For Companies - Companies get a fresh perspective and enthusiastic effort on tasks that full-time employees often find routine or menial. So besides getting many iterations of an otherwise routine task done for a low set price; companies can use these projects specifically to screen candidates for internships and recent college grads. While students are using it to build there resumes, companies are using it to identify the students with those quality resumes.

Win for Colleges and Universities - They are the ONLY place the money CAN be spent.

Since the projectscholarship.org site has been built, the main objectives are marketing and support of the platform. Just because you build it, it doesn't mean that they will come. Project Scholarship needs to have distinct strategies to assure awareness, trust, and financial stability.

We have defined each strategy as a project. Project one is a Monthly Expert Sessions. The purpose of these sessions is to assure the future college students and parents that they can trust that Project Scholarship is run by industry insiders who understand Higher Education.

Because the content produced via these sessions is so valuable we are leveraging it as part of the overall fundraising strategy. The ultimate goal is to provide this content to the consumers for free as part of our overall mission, yet few foundations will support a startup 501c3, so we intend to leverage our greatest asset until we can garner that foundation support..

The College Admissions Cycle is an annual process. with distinct areas of focus each month. Thus Project Scholarship is interviewing the industry experts in each area, with a new interview premiering each month. We are offering our Founding Sponsors and other sponsors to option of hosting live premieres of these expert sessions in their offices. After the premier, the content is accessible in our closed

Project two is Project Cornhole. We intend to use professionally hosted Cornhole tournaments to drive awareness of our platform to current students and the universities they attend. Through a partnership with US Cornhole project scholarship will be able to offer Student groups and Parent associations across the country a unique fundraiser. US Cornhole will manage and officiate a cornhole tournament on campus or at a High School. The hosting organization will have a project scholarship campaign configured on Crowdrise for their tournament. The hosting student and/or parent organizations simply focuses on raising money for the tournament via the Crowdrise platform. A portion of the net funds raised will go to the hosting organizing group and the cost of managing tournament. The remaining balance becomes the Scholarship Amount being awarded like all other scholarships through the projectscholarship.org platform.

Through our board and existing volunteer network, we have all of the capabilities required to be successful. Our group has years of experience within the Higher Education and college planning field. Our team has extensive experience with the financial services industry, telecom, and technology industries in addition to a resident CPA. Members of our team have owned multiple businesses as well as a member who has founded technology companies.

Although combined there is a vast deal of marketing experience, this will be one of the first places that excess funds raised will be utilized.

The greatest accomplishment thus far has been getting the projectsholarship.org site live and prepared to run autonomously with little need for human intervention.

The bigger challenge is being apple to support the sight as it scales. Because we realize this as a concern we have gone with a very slow launch. The unfortunate aspect of the slow launch is that it highlights the greatest weakness of a marketplace, which is that it is extremely inefficient prior to reaching critical mass. The Chicken or Egg Dilemma that all marketplaces face become quite apparent in the live version of the site. Fortunately, financial resources can be used to overcome this issue. Paid digital marketing is built into our long term funding model. We simply need the immediate founding Sponsors to reach that point.

Thus our whats next is doing the strategic marketing projects that are designed to raise money and awareness of the platform. The Founding Sponsors are most critical. Once they are secured, our focus shifts towards the Public based fundraising over the next few years until the platform itself can reach critical mass and become self-funding.