An Update on the Twitter Scholarship

When we initially announced the Twitter Scholarship we announced a rather large prize and promoted it quite aggressively by…

• making a custom logo for it
• promoting it across hundreds of pages on our widely read site
• mentioning it on our blog
• pinging some of our contacts in the industry and emailed a few bloggers about it
• promoting it on Twitter
• and we even went as far as buying Google AdWords ads to help get the word out

…but none of it worked 🙁

I am not sure if it was bad timing, if the submission was too complex, or if students have become more jaded about scholarship offers due lots of fake scholarship offers advertised by affiliate marketers who are doing lead generation – who never actually send out scholarship money.

Each year we do award students with $10,000+ in scholarship program awards, and have done so for the past 4 years now. We were anticipating getting thousands to 10,000’s of entries for the Twitter Scholarship, but so far we have been underwhelmed by the quantity (and to a lesser degree, quality) of the submissions. We have therefore decided to adjust the Twitter scholarship awards to

• winner – $1,400
• first runner up – $140
• second runner up – $140

We will distribute the additional funds we had earmarked for this scholarship throughout the upcoming year by launching more new scholarships.