Turning feedback into opportunity

How Scholar Fund helps students access college and career pathways with Alchemer

Scholar Fund partnered with Alchemer to amplify student voices and build scalable support systems for college and career readiness. By saving days of data cleaning, supporting multiple languages in a single survey, and scaling seamlessly across schools, they’re reaching more students with the accurate, timely guidance needed to turn aspirations into opportunities.

About Scholar Fund

Scholar Fund is a Washington-based nonprofit organization dedicated to connecting underserved communities with educational opportunities, financial resources, and system-strengthening tools that create impact beyond the individual. Their mission is to connect community needs to opportunities and resources by creating scalable, real-time solutions through technology and community-centered projects.

Their track record speaks volumes, over 13,000 students have secured $100 million in scholarships, and nearly $300 million in direct cash assistance has been deployed to individuals and businesses in need. Beyond financial support, the Education Strategy Team at Scholar Fund partners with schools, districts, and systems to ensure that students of color in Washington state achieve postsecondary success with the support of racially just school systems who center students, families, and communities.

They focus on providing:

  • Coaching and facilitation: supporting schools, districts, and communities with continuous improvement practices and processes
  • Engagement: developing tools and processes to elevate student, family, and community voice in college and career supports
  • Data: conducting analysis and creating dashboards to inform strategy development and increase college access indicators
Four students sit on outdoor steps, reading books and papers together. They appear focused and are casually dressed, with backpacks nearby, suggesting a study session or group project.

The Challenge: Collecting scalable student feedback for college readiness

In early 2024, Scholar Fund launched one of its most significant and ambitious efforts to date, the Continuous Improvement Project. Brian Chu, Director of Systems Integration at Scholar Fund, partnered with the Education Strategy team to implement a large-scale survey initiative to capture the voices of students, families, and staff, turning their experiences into insights that strengthened in-school support systems for college and career readiness. In the first year of the survey administration, Scholar Fund was able to reach 14 schools and more than 2,900 people across three regions of Washington State. By the third year, this survey could span 90 schools and reach more than 40,000 people across four regions of Washington State. The survey is made up 3 tools: a student survey, a family survey, and an educator survey. The tools features over 50 thoughtfully crafted questions designed to surface the real experiences and perspectives of high school students, families, and staff throughout the three-year initiative.

This multi-year college and career readiness survey program set out to better understand how schools in Washington State support students along the pathway from high school to higher education and careers, and more importantly, how those support systems could be improved.

The project’s goals included:

  • Helping students get the right information to complete financial aid forms on time, apply to colleges, and meet admissions requirements.
  • Understanding student experiences with in-school support systems, identifying who students rely on for guidance, and where information gaps exist.
  • Collecting input from families and staff to build a complete picture of how support systems are functioning.

 

Before Alchemer, Scholar Fund relied on external partners to administer surveys. While functional, the process was cumbersome and constrained. Separate surveys had to be created for different languages, which meant three separate sets of data to merge and clean. Every cycle, the team spent an entire day just fixing data files before they could even begin analysis.

Brian knew success hinged on the right tool. It had to power a survey process that was accessible, engaging, and highly customizable, while still producing clean, scalable data to help schools strengthen the systems students rely on to reach their postsecondary goals.

To succeed, Scholar Fund needed a survey platform that could:

  • Deliver customized, school-level links that preserved anonymity while still allowing results to flow back to each school.
  • Provide multiple survey entry points—including QR codes—to make participation as simple and accessible as possible, especially for students completing surveys on their phones.
  • Support multiple languages seamlessly, without requiring separate builds, complicated coding of responses, and allowing for open-ended responses in multiple languages in non-English characters and accent marks.
  • Offer advanced question types like drag-and-drop ranking, critical for capturing how students prioritize sources of information about college readiness.
  • Seamlessly export data into Scholar Fund’s existing pipeline for analysis and Tableau dashboards, eliminating extra formatting steps and speeding time to insights.

Solution: How Alchemer streamlined Scholar Fund's Continuous Improvement Project

When evaluating survey platforms, Brian searched for a partner that could meet the realities of working with thousands of students and families across diverse communities. He found Qualtrics was too costly for the project’s budget. QuestionPro offered fewer customization options and required pre-purchasing response batches, making it hard to estimate the right contract size. Alchemer stood out because it combined the flexibility and customization Scholar Fund needed with the simplicity and efficiency their small team required, something no other platform could deliver.

“The customizability of Alchemer was a big draw. There were a lot of features that I hadn’t really seen in other platforms, like QR codes for accessing surveys, the ability to paste in responses to get them added to a choice question, and being able to alias the survey column names within the survey platform.”

— Brian Chu, Director of Systems Integration, Scholar Fund

For Brian, the combination of Alchemer’s intuitive design and on-demand support was game-changing. With a tailored demo, hands-on onboarding, and fast implementation, Alchemer helped Scholar Fund quickly launch a survey process for the Continuous Improvement Project that was both flexible and powerful:

  • Custom school links and QR codes allowed each school to distribute a unique survey while keeping responses anonymous. This made it easy for students, many of whom preferred to respond on their phones, to access the survey in just a few clicks. By relying on URL parameters, Scholar Fund could customize surveys at the school level without building multiple versions, saving significant time and reducing errors.
  • Built-in translation meant the team could build a single survey that reached families in both English and Spanish, eliminating the need for duplicate builds or manual translation. This not only improved the participant experience but also simplified analysis.
  • Advanced question types like drag-and-drop ranking captured critical insights, such as who students rely on most for information about college applications and financial aid.
  • Seamless data exports simplified the workflow, feeding directly into Scholar Fund’s Tableau dashboards and reducing hours of manual data cleaning and speeding up reporting.

 

The survey results are already delivering powerful insights. In its first year, one finding stood out: students, especially students of color and first-generation students, are eager to go to college but often lack reliable guidance on how to get there. Sharing this data directly with educators and staff has helped shift mindsets, showing that students are motivated but rely on strong in-school support systems, especially accurate, timely information and guidance on financial aid, to succeed. Understanding who they trust most for advice, and where school-based support programs fall short, has now become a central focus of the project.

A man wearing headphones and glasses smiles while using a laptop at a desk. There are books, papers, a plant, and a smartphone nearby in a bright, cozy room.

Key Outcomes

With Alchemer, Scholar Fund turned a once time-consuming, fragmented process into a streamlined system they could manage entirely in-house.

  • Time savings: What used to take days of cleaning and fixing data now flows seamlessly into Tableau dashboards, freeing up the small team to focus on insights, not administration.
  • Scalability: One survey now supports 14 schools (and growing), with customization handled centrally. Without Alchemer, maintaining and translating separate surveys for each school and language would have been impossible.
  • Cost efficiency: By eliminating contracts tied to partial responses, Scholar Fund gained the flexibility to scale participation without worrying about unpredictable costs.
  • Empowered team: Alchemer allowed Brian and his team to condense the entire survey pipeline into a manageable system he could maintain on his own, maximizing efficiency and output.

 

Most importantly, Alchemer gave Scholar Fund the scalable, efficient, and accessible system they needed to deliver on their mission: helping schools better understand, and improve, the supports students rely on to pursue college and career goals.

“Alchemer has allowed me to condense our data pipeline for this project and maintain these systems on my own. For a small data function like ours, that’s huge.”

— Brian Chu, Director of Systems Integration, Scholar Fund

Conclusion

Alchemer gave Scholar Fund the scalable, efficient, and accessible system they needed to deliver on their mission: helping schools better understand, and improve, the supports students rely on to pursue college and career goals. For Brian Chu and his team, the right survey platform wasn’t just a tool, it became a catalyst for equity, efficiency, and meaningful change across Washington State schools.

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