Counselor Starter Guide: How to Use Going Merry’s Scholarship Platform
You’re a counselor and have signed up to use Going Merry to help your students navigate how to pay for college, by applying for government financial aid and private “outside” scholarships.
But where do you start? In this guide, we’ll go step by step, showing you screenshots of where you can find everything you need.
Let’s dive in!
Getting started: Take the website tour
When you first sign up, you’ll land on your “Home” page, which will have a handy “Getting started” guide. We recommend you begin with the green button that says: “Take the tour.”
This will guide you through much of the website, with handy tooltips, like so:
If you accidentally X out this “Getting started” panel – Don’t worry! You can still access the website tour by scrolling to the bottom of the page and hitting the green “Take the tour” button:
The other two important things to do when you’re just getting started are:
- Invite your students (more on that later!)
- Join an optional webinar demo (schedule it here) to learn how we make it easier for your students to find and apply for financial aid!
Consult your checklist
When in doubt, you can consult your Counselor Checklist (also under “Home”), which will give you a sense of what you should do next. When you’re done with something, click the item and it’ll get crossed out:
Now, we’ll go over each of those items in the checklist and how to complete them.
1. Invite your students
To help your students find and apply to scholarships and financial aid, invite them to Going Merry. Just hit the “Add Students” button on your dashboard.
There are 4 easy ways you can invite students:
- Invite your Google Classroom – Connect your existing Google Classroom and email your students an invitation to join Going Merry in just a few clicks.
- Add your students’ emails – By copying and pasting, or by importing from your email contacts and we will send them an email invitation.
- Share your personalized link with students – By adding it to a handout, emailing, or text messaging your students or use our email template to email the invite from your email.
- Upload your class list – Use our secure upload portal to submit your student list. Once we receive your list, we will invite your students to Going Merry and notify them via email.
After this, you’ll be able to “Track student progress” (also on the left menu) to see a full list of students at your school who have signed up for Going Merry. For each student:
- You’ll see how many scholarship applications they’ve started (Draft) or completed (Submitted).
- You can upload transcripts or recommendation letters for them. (Don’t worry, students will not be able to see the contents of the transcript or recommendation letter, only that you have uploaded one.)
2. Track your students’ FAFSA® progress.
The FAFSA® is a critical step for your students to get help paying for college, and we know it can be a lot of work to follow up with each of them (and their parents) to answer questions, ensure they’re meeting deadlines, and in some cases, to ensure they complete it as a graduation requirement.
Your free counselor account includes:
- the ability to track students’ self-supported FAFSA® application progress;
- a suite of templates and tips (like flyers to post in senior hallways, ready-made PPT presentations for FAFSA® nights/workshops, financial aid lesson plans, etc.) for you to use; and
- a financial aid appeal letter generator to walk you through assisting your student with appealing their financial aid offer for more money (your students have access to this in their accounts, too!).
3. Use the free resource library
On the checklist, you’ll see links to a scholarship websites flyer and counselor lesson plans. These and other resources are available under “Counselor Resources.” You’ll see:
- Printable (or email-able) handouts
- Lesson plans and accompanying student worksheets
- Email templates for students and parents
- Blog articles on all kinds of topics, including financial aid, scholarship essays, and more
4. Highlight scholarships on your school website
You can showcase scholarships on your website by adding a live-updating scholarships table. We’ve made this super easy to do. Just hit the “Add scholarships table” link on the left menu. It’ll take you here:
On this page, select your school color to customize the widget, preview what the widget would look like on desktop and mobile, and then copy and paste the widget code to send to your school’s IT team. Your IT team will know how to add it to your website. (It’s literally copying and pasting into the website code, so it should take 5 minutes.)
Here’s what it looks like on one school’s website:
5. Browse available scholarships
You can search for scholarships (use the search bar to populate more results), browse scholarships available for students to apply for, or filter scholarships by items like deadline, award amount, and number of recipients in the “Scholarships” tab.
What you see in the “Scholarships” tab is more or less what students see in their Going Merry dashboard. There are two main differences:
- When signing up, students will be asked a few questions (like their class year, what school they attend, and their GPA) to fill out a “profile” that we will use to match them to scholarships they are eligible for. Therefore, while you will see a list of all kinds of scholarships, students will only see scholarships matched to their specific profile.
- Students will see a “Start Application” button on the scholarship pages (if they’re eligible to apply), while you as a counselor won’t.
You can email links to particular scholarships (or just print them out!) to suggest any you think would particularly suit a certain student. Or you can create a custom list of scholarships within your account.
To get the scholarship page’s link, click on a scholarship then hit the “Copy Scholarship Link” button on the right, as shown here:
6. Digitize your school’s local scholarship program
Did you know you can bring your local school/district scholarship program online, for free? This allows your students to find and apply for scholarships all in one place. If you’d like, you can even review your applications online, rate them, and alert winners–all using our “scholarship administrator” portal.
You can learn more about hosting your local scholarships on Going Merry here. Or want a case study of how this works? Check out the wonders it’s done for Arcadia High School in California.
What does it look like for a student?
We’ve written this separate article (with lots of helpful screenshots too!) so you can also see what it looks like from the student’s point of view, from sign up through to scholarship application submission.
Ready to get started with Going Merry as a counselor?
OK, so you’ve seen the dashboard, step-by-step, from top to bottom. Now, it’s your turn! Take your dashboard for a spin so you can help students find and apply for scholarships. We’re all about making the scholarship application process easier for everyone involved, especially counselors like you.
If you’re not signed up yet, you can register for your free counselor account here. Get started today to help set up your students for success.
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