Donor FAQs

Yes! Donations are made to the Bold Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit (Federal Tax ID #84-2719715). When your donation is processed, you’ll receive an email with documentation confirming your tax-deductible donation.

Donations made by credit card process right away. Donations made by ACH can take 3-5 business to process.

Since awards require a time commitment from applicants, we verify that the award is ready by accepting the donation upfront before asking applicants to spend the time to apply. If you have a special request for a different process, please contact donors@bold.org to discuss!

The Bold Foundation holds the scholarship donation in cash escrow until you’ve selected your winner, at which point we’ll distribute the funds to the winner as specified by your award specifications.

100% of your tax-deductible donation will go to a deserving recipient chosen based on the selection criteria for your scholarship, and will typically be either applied directly to their tuition or directly to their student loans. In cases where you’ve requested the award go towards an educational experience, we require documentation from the recipient that the award has been used for eligible expenses.

In general, we work with financial aid offices to apply awards directly to your recipient’s tuition. If you’d like, you can also specify that you’d like your award to go towards paying off your recipient’s student loans, or to covering other educational expenses. In all cases, the purpose of your grant must be to achieve a specific objective, produce a report or other similar product, or improve or enhance a literary, artistic, musical, scientific, teaching, or other similar capacity, skill, or talent of the grantee.

People! Our team reads every application to your scholarship and, based on the scholarship’s selection criteria, puts together a list of finalists. From there, you’ll work with our donor team to select the winner as part of the scholarship panel.

We currently support one login per donor account, but are working on multi-login support.

Yes! Check our Award Features page for more details.

Yes, we can typically facilitate this upon request!

Bold.org award applicants have extensive profiles that detail their background, abilities, and goals. These profiles are included in every application and are used to evaluate candidates for no-essay awards.

To create a fund, submit your fund goal on your donor dashboard and our team will work closely with you to launch it within 2-3 days.

A fund is a fundraising page where you can raise money for scholarships and the scholarship is where students will apply. You can have either by themselves, or you can have both together. They are created separately. The fund will have your mission and goal amount you’re hoping to raise, and the scholarship will have the background of the scholarship and the criteria for the ideal applicant. Students will be able to apply on the scholarship page but not the fund page.

Once you have hit your fundraising goal, you can transfer the money into your scholarship proposal directly on your dashboard. The scholarship will have a button that says “review proposal” and when you click into that there will be a green button that says “fund the scholarship”. You will click on that and choose your method of payment as your fund. If you do not have a scholarship proposal set up, but you have reached your fundraising goal, you will need to submit your scholarship proposal first.

No. Any money donated to the fundraiser will then need to be used to fund an existing Bold.org scholarship, or a new scholarship created by you.

No, it sits in a cash escrow account!

No, the scholarship will need to be created first, and it does require you to manually fund it through your dashboard.

This depends on the scholarship’s eligibility criteria and award timeline. Scholarships with more narrow criteria will typically receive 50-200 applications. Broader scholarships will receive many hundreds of applications.

Bold.org applicants range from high schoolers through to graduate students, and include many recent graduates with student debt as well. Based on the award criteria, we’ll reach out directly to eligible applicants and relevant organizations to make sure quality candidates apply.

Yes! Many Bold.org members are graduates who are focused on paying off their student debt.

Bold.org donors include individuals, families, large and small companies, foundations, and more. We make it easy for anyone and any organization to create and manage customized scholarships, fellowships, and grants, in minutes.

We work with highly vetted partner companies that support our operations and allow us to keep Bold.org completely free for applicants and fee-free for donors, with 100% of donations going to recipients.