If you have a product that you want to sell to young people or if you want to find talented young people to hire for your team, then scholarships are one of the best ways to achieve those goals. Most importantly, it’s a great way to give students the financial freedom they need to pay for their education while increasing crypto adoption.

Students are the best Target Market For Crypto

At Atila, we believe that citizens of countries facing high inflation and students are the demographics that will see the first wave of big crypto adoption. Amongst these two groups, we think students are the best market to focus on initially.

Students Don’t Have Strong Ties to the Current Financial System

Older demographics have many ties with their banks in the form of a chequing account, savings account, investment account, credit card, line of credit, mortgage, just to name a few. This means that the switching costs for getting people to use new financial products is very high. Even if these products might be better for them, the mental burden is too high. Students don’t have these same switching costs. Many students only have a chequing account and some of them don’t even have that. A student once emailed us and asked if we could send a scholarship award to their parent’s bank account because they didn’t have their own bank account.

This is why we believe that many students will have a crypto wallet before they have a real wallet (or a chequing account). This is important for crypto companies because if you want a student to use your product, there is no status quo to compete against. You simply have to make something people want.

They Have Dense Social Networks

Students spend a lot of time in school, clubs and social groups that tend to be more networked and connected. They tend to have much denser social networks than adults who are no longer in school, are busy with the responsibilities of adulthood and generally keep in touch with a few friends from school, work.

This means that both the creation and growing of network effects amongst students is a lot easier and effective than in other demographics.

For example, if you wanted to target every 18-21 year old in New York City, you would simply just have to do a campaign catered towards students at Columbia, NYU, Laguardia, Baruch etc. However,  if you wanted to launch a product targeting everyone between the ages of 21-30 in New York City there isn’t a very easy way to do it.

Students are also more digitally native, so they’re more likely to amplify messages on social media, further increasing organic word of mouth spread.

Students are More Open Minded

There’s a lot of resistance and skepticism surrounding cryptocurrencies right now. Part of it is due to the amount of scams that currently exists in the space, part of it is due to people not understanding how cryptocurrencies work, part of it is due to ties to the current financial system which we’ve covered and part of it is good old fashioned human nature and an aversion to change.

The first three problems will subside with time as cryptocurrency evolves. However, the human nature to be resistant to change is a tough one to resolve. The quickest way to overcome this hurdle is by starting with people that are more receptive to this positive change. The youth of students means that they are generally more open minded to new things and are more open to accepting the benefits of cryptocurrencies.

The Novelty of Crypto Scholarships Creates Good Press

With so many things competing for our attention everyday, it can be hard for companies to generate announcements that can make headlines and grab people’s attention.

One of the best ways to achieve this is with superlative or precedents. In other words, anytime a company can say they are the “best” at X or the “first” to do something it gets people’s attention. While being the best is very subjective and thus, less effective. It’s much more attainable and effective to do something “first”. 

If a company can say they’re the “first every crypto company to offer a crypto scholarship” its the type of thing that causes people to pay attention because it’s intriguing, it’s something they haven’t seen before. It’s the type of thing that journalists would want to write about.

Increasing Crypto Adoption and Fun with Airdrops

One cool feature about Atila is that when students apply to crypto scholarships on Atila they connect their crypto wallet (Metamask, Trust Wallet etc.) to their application before they submit their application. Scholarship sponsors have the ability to see and export each applicant’s application including the applicant’s public address.

This opens up a lot of creative web3 marketing and promotion campaigns such as airdropping a token to all the applicants or finalists of your scholarship. Another idea you could try is airdropping some ETH/BNB/MATIC to the finalists and putting it in a smart contract that they can claim by making an account on your platform.

Special care should be taken with these approaches however, because marketers often abuse these types of opportunities in the web2 world by creating “data capture scholarships” that are really just a front to collect people’s emails and spam them. This occasionally works in the short-term but is a terrible long-term strategy that gets poor leads, annoys people and destroys brand image.

A better approach is to ask merit based questions and make an earnest effort to ask good questions, grade the applicants fairly and pick the most deserving application.

Scholarships Have Stronger Word of Mouth and Organic Reach than Other Channels

Due to the nature of scholarships (i.e. opportunity to win a large amount of money based on merit and it pays better than a part-time job) they get spread around more than other types of opportunities.

Whereas with job postings, people might share it around with a couple of their friends that are looking for a job. Scholarships routinely get shared widely. Both amongst students and amongst parents and students or within parents in group chats, parent groups etc.

Scholarships are also superior to paid advertising channels because with paid ads you have to pay for each person that sees your ad. People usually don’t share ads with other people.

This allows scholarships to potentially have a multiplier effect where the brand awareness of your scholarship campaign can in some cases have a reach that is far greater than an equivalent amount spent on Facebook or Google ads. For example, during the Skateboards for Hope scholarship, we ran a few paid ads through Facebook that generated less than 2000 views and cost us about 42 cents per result. Whereas we gathered 4,386 impressions from posting on Instagram, and having our content shared by other action sports organizations.

Learn about Students in a Deeper Way

Unlike with a typical job application or user surveys where students get asked a fairly limited set of questions. With scholarships, the questions tend to be more open-ended which leads to more interesting answers and more interesting insights.

For example, you might decide to do a scholarship for Computer Science students with the plan of identifying some of them to join your company as a software engineering intern. However, one of your questions could be to tell me about your proudest accomplishment. Then discover that one of the applicants has a lot of leadership potential.

An example: We had a STEM scholarship and one of our finalists talked about the importance of mentorship. She ended up not winning the award but we ended up hiring her as an intern.

Another example, would be instead of asking students “what crypto apps do you use” which is a fairly standard user research question. You could ask students, “how has cryptocurrencies impacted your life?” This will get much more insightful responses that would drive your product and marketing decisions in a more useful way and give better insights to learn how to use crypto to better serve students. Also, because students are answering these questions with the aim of winning a scholarship, their responses will be a lot more detailed and thorough than the responses you would get in a typical use research survey.

You can see some of the past applications to Atila scholarships to get a sense of the high quality and depth of responses that students are capable of giving if you ask the right questions.

Scholarships Align Well with the Mission of Crypto

Many of us came into the crypto space because we believe in the concept of giving people more freedom and choice with their life. At Atila we believe the two most important pillars to getting this freedom is through education and financial independence. Crypto Scholarships are a great way to achieve all three goals of growing your business, increasing crypto adoption and most importantly, helping students fund their education.