Chegg Scholarships

Chegg’s priority is helping students succeed throughout school into post-graduation life—that includes financially, as well. There are so many scholarships available to help students fund their higher education. That being said, trying to find the scholarships for which an individual student qualifies is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Chegg sees an opportunity to lessen the burden on students, and to potentially increase the likelihood of receiving financial assistance.

Problem

There is an abundance of scholarships available to those looking to fund their higher education experience. There are scholarships available for specific ethnicities, genders, ages, first-generation college students, certain interests, and GPA, to name a few—and any combination of those things, as well. The list is almost limitless. That abundance, though, can be overwhelming. As a student looking for financial assistance, you’d want to make sure that you’d taken every opportunity available to you. It is impossible, though, to know if you’ve applied for every opportunity for which you qualify. It’s incredibly daunting, if you stop to think about it. The time and energy it takes to scour the internet—or any resource for that matter—just to find these opportunities is exhausting, let alone the effort involved in following through and applying for them.

Solution

Chegg is hoping to take care of one side of the equation for students. If students could be provided with a list of the scholarships that they best qualify for and only had to worry about completing the applications, think of how much stress could be alleviated for them. We partnered with Chegg to help achieve just that. Chegg was already providing an avenue for students to search for scholarships, but knew it could improve. They wanted to create an experience tailored to students, intentionally matching them with scholarships rather than a passive, traditional search experience. We began by completing a competitive analysis and taking a close look at Chegg’s existing solution, learning what worked and what did not. We decided on a direction and began building out a solution, iterating as we went. Our focus was on creating an experience tailored to an individual user—providing suggested scholarships based on what we know about them, email reminders of upcoming submission deadlines, and notifications of new scholarships they qualify for as they become available. The process of working with Chegg through the development process was unique in this situation. Up to this point, we had worked with Chegg’s internal development team very closely—we built out the front-end while Chegg’s team handled the backend within their existing architecture. With this project, Chegg no longer had the capacity on their internal team to work alongside us, but we had a shared trust and understanding of what we were trying to accomplish and found ways to ensure value was delivered regardless. We had daily touchpoints to keep them updated on our progress and worked to build out the experience and interface for users. We used the knowledge we gained from prior projects to inform decisions we made to allow for a smooth integration at a later date. We ended the engagement with a product ready to be tested, refined, and integrated into the Chegg architecture.