EDUCATION

Using digital documents to improve scholarship application success rates

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Amy Gladden is a counselor for a school district in, “right on Highway 7… in the middle of the Davy Crockett National Forest,” she said. Rather than the stereotypical Texan landscape of dust and oil wells, this region of the state is a bucolic, lushly forested oasis that seems closer to the terrain of New England than the deep south. But Gladden’s rich, distinctive Texan drawl gives her location away. Here, in East Texas, Gladden is responsible for 275 students from 3 to 18 years old.

ProblemProblem

Gladden’s position as a counselor for the school district means that she has to fill in scholarship applications for her students. These applications are of critical importance to her students – getting them right is crucial.
“[I was] trying to find a program that let me fill in scholarships for kids so they were not handwritten and so they were nice and neat. We were hoping it would give the kids a little bit of an edge in scholarships,” Gladden said.
But before Gladden found pdfFiller, she was stuck using a typewriter in an attempt to create neat scholarship applications – the solution was clumsy and slow. “I used an electric typewriter,” before switching to pdfFiller, Gladden said – “definitely old school.”
Now, however, Gladden has modernized her workflow, integrating pdfFiller’s completely digital solution, making neat, typewritten scholarship applications easier than ever to create.

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The SolutionThe Solution

Switching to pdfFiller was easy. “I find [pdfFiller] to be user friendly,” said Gladden. “I was using a typewriter before, so it’s not that I’m tech savvy” – instead, pdfFiller’s online access and clear user interface makes completing documents digitally simple.
The digital solution to creating neat, typewritten scholarship applications is easy: “I automatically upload [scholarship applications] to pdfFiller,” said Gladden. Applications can be downloaded from the internet or from emails and then uploaded to pdfFiller or alternatively, paper documents can be scanned and then uploaded.
Because they are coming from everywhere – the internet, emails, scholarship databases, or directly from organizations like the Rotary Club, the Lions Club, or the Masonic Lodge, Gladden needed an easy way to collate these applications as well as complete and save them.
“The students fill out the scholarships… bring the paperwork to me and then I use what they’ve written and I [use] pdfFiller to type everything in and then I print that out,” said Gladden.
Editing documents and adding information with pdfFiller is simple. Once the documents have been uploaded, pdfFiller’s powerful document editing tools enable Gladden to write directly onto scholarship applications, changing the font as necessary. pdfFiller even allows you to highlight, redact, edit, and add sticky notes to documents in just a click.
The result is neater, more legible documents. “Everything is typed and looks nice and neat,” said Gladden.
“It’s all about presentation,” said Gladden. “Definitely [it’s an aesthetic thing]. And I definitely think it gives us an edge.”
And though Gladden began using pdfFiller for scholarship applications, now she is using it daily for all her administrative work. “This is my second year (using pdfFiller) daily. Now we use it not just for scholarships, but if I have a field trip form, I use pdfFiller to fill that out. Nothing leaves my office that’s handwritten… any form that I can scan and put in pdfFiller, I do it,” Gladden said.
Because Gladden is on a deadline when completing scholarship applications, completing documents digitally allows her to streamline her workflow and decrease her turnaround time.
Advanced features like LinkToFill, SendToSign, Fill In Bulk and templates enable users to expedite their digital document workflow.
LinkToFill icon
LinkToFill allows users to send documents to other users with customized fillable fields that make them quick to complete.
SendToSign icon
SendToSign can help you distribute digital documents to others to return instantly with their legally-binding digital signature in just one click.
Creating Templates icon
Fill In Bulk lets you mitigate the tedious and time-consuming process of adding information to multiple versions of the same form.
Creating Templates icon
Creating Templates in pdfFiller makes it easy to add basic information to multiple documents and then complete customized fields manually for any number of forms and whenever necessary.
Moreover, through pdfFiller’s online interface, it’s easy to send your completed documents to your intended recipients.
Documents are saved on secure servers accessible anytime, anywhere, and from any internet-connected device. This means that you can complete forms from any device and access your data wherever you happen to be. Work from the train, from home, or at your office and keep all your documents synchronized.
Conclusion
pdfFiller is the easiest way to complete digital documents online. A range of powerful features combined with easy to use document annotation tools make it simple to take your document workflow digital. For Amy Gladden, using pdfFiller has helped make her scholarship applications neater and, she says, improved her students’ success rate.
“I have recommended it to everyone,” said Gladden – “I really love pdfFiller, and I use it every single day.”

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