The NSPA Member Data Center allows you to update information in the NSPA Exchange about your organization’s programs. This ensures that information shared with NSPA members and the public is consistent and correct.
Essential Factoids
A few things worth knowing:
Each record in the system represents one scholarship or financial aid program. If the program makes multiple awards per year, there is still only one record — we have a data field to indicate the number of awards.
There are relatively few data points to maintain and all (except the program name) are optional. The data points include common values such as the application opening date, the application deadline, a URL for an online application, and so forth.
You can’t break the system or “ruin” live data. If you can break things, it’s our problem to fix, not yours! Any changes, additions, and deletions you make are done in a staging area and are reviewed by an NSPA Data Team member before being merged in the live database.
You get unlimited do-overs. You can make multiple edits before sending your data to the NSPA Data Team for review. And, even after review and integration with the live data, you start a new set of edits — anytime. The NSPA Data Team works year-round and the site is open 24/7. So, there’s no deadline.
Options for Updating
The Data Center directly supports multiple options for updating data.
Option 1. Online, using the web-based form
This is suitable if you:
Are a program provider that offers relatively few programs.
Only have a few data points or a few records to update.
Prefer working entirely online vs. using spreadsheets.
Option 2. In Excel, using a provided template pre-filled with your existing data
This is suitable if you:
Are a program provider such as a community foundation that manages many programs.
Prefer making bulk updates via spreadsheet.
Want to import data from another system that can export to a spreadsheet format.