Financial aid is one of the most consequential touchpoints a college has with its students. At Bunker Hill Community College, which serves between 10,000 and 12,000 students per semester, the financial aid office had long known that how quickly and easily a student could complete their file wasn’t just an operational concern. It was a student success concern.
Getting the right aid to the right student at the right time matters. Softdocs helped Bunker Hill do it faster.
At a glance
- Currently migrating 2.1 million documents from Perceptive Content to Softdocs Content
- Financial aid packages are delivered 2–3 weeks earlier than when paper-based
- Time to receive missing information request: reduced from 1 week to instantaneous
- Internal file review time: reduced by approx. 1.5 weeks
- 87 active forms just in financial aid — the highest form count of any office on campus
- Thousands of forms are processed per year through financial aid alone
A Paper-Based Process That Was Not Working
Before Softdocs, submitting financial aid documents meant coming to campus or mailing them in. Neither was easy. Students who couldn't make it in person had to find a post office and mail sensitive paperwork, including tax forms, at their own expense.
During peak enrollment in August, the college's busiest month, students stood in line for 2-3 hours just to hand over paperwork and be told their files would be reviewed in a few weeks.
Prior to Softdocs, we were paper-based. And it was terrible. It was not a great experience for students. It was a nightmare for us.
Jillian Glaze, Senior Director of Student Financial Services Bunker Hill Community College
Staff were chasing paper constantly. The back-and-forth with students over corrections and missing information created delays that compounded across every file. The college knew it needed electronic document collection.
The question was finding a system that could handle the volume.
Why Softdocs
The team evaluated several vendor options. Most of them were immediately disqualifying: they charged per form, and the financial aid office’s volume made the numbers unworkable. Financial aid at Bunker Hill processes thousands of forms per year. Per-form pricing, at that scale, was prohibitively expensive. Softdocs was not priced that way.
Beyond cost, what drew the team in was the integration with Ellucian Colleague, the college's student information system. Students were already using the Colleague self-service portal to track their missing items, and Softdocs linked directly into it. When a student clicked on a missing item, the form opened already populated with their name and student ID.
From the student's perspective, it looked and felt like one system — and that capability, Glaze said, was what made her fall in love with the product.
It felt like one system for students, which was really what we were looking for.
Jillian Glaze, Senior Director of Student Financial Services Bunker Hill Community College
Ease of adoption rounded out the decision. The team wanted students to be able to complete forms without a training session or a help desk call. That proved out almost immediately.
During testing, before the office had told anyone the system was live, a completed form came in from a student. The student had just found it and figured it out on their own.
Implementation: Going All In
Bunker Hill received funding approval just before the pandemic hit. COVID pushed up the timeline and removed the option of a slow transition. With students off campus and no mechanism to collect documentation, going fully digital was no longer just a preference.
The pressure was definitely on, but it turned out to be a perfect test case. The team made a deliberate choice to commit fully rather than phase anything in.
We were very aggressive about fully committing to Softdocs and making sure that it was like a positive experience for the students… walking away from paper entirely in one swoop was the goal.
Keisa Davis-Rezendes, Associate Director of Student Financial Services Bunker Hill Community College
The goal was to walk away from paper entirely in one fell swoop. Staff buy-in came more easily than expected. The paper process had created a constant cycle of back-and-forth corrections that resulted in delays for everyone, and framing Softdocs as a way to shorten that timeline, from receiving a document to getting it off the file review list, was all the convincing staff needed.
Throughout rollout, the team made changes on the fly. When feedback came in — a student skipping a section, confusion around a field, something that wasn't working — they took the form down, fixed it, and put it back up.
That responsiveness built trust in the product among both students and staff.
Results: Faster Aid, Less Friction, More Transparency
Speed was the most direct outcome. The results were hard to miss. Even staff who had nothing to do with document intake noticed that the students who previously stood around with paper in their hands had disappeared.
- Missing information requests that took a week to reach students are now instantaneous
- Internal file review time dropped by a week and a half
- Students now receive financial aid packages 2-3 weeks earlier than when the office ran on paper
For a campus that needed to see results before fully embracing new technology, the disappearing student lines said everything.
The nature of the student interaction changed as well. Rather than digitizing the old paper form, the team rethought the process from the student's perspective. The verification worksheet is the clearest example — a master study, as the team described it, in how much FAFSA data could be pulled directly into the form, and their sleekest work.
Instead of asking students to re-enter information the office already had, the forms pulled marital status and tax filing type from Colleague, displayed it, and asked students to confirm. Skip logic and edit checks routed each student through only the questions relevant to them. Help text addressed jargon that had historically caused confusion.
We wanted to mimic the experience of the student walking up to the front desk with this form and saying, ‘I don't know how to fill this out. Can you help me?’ We wanted to build that into the Softdocs form.
Keisa Davis-Rezendes, Associate Director of Student Financial Services Bunker Hill Community College
Students were asked fewer questions with fewer requests, and verification of completion rates improved. Transparency was an unexpected benefit — students now see where their document sits in the review process, how long it has been there, and who is handling it.
That visibility keeps the staff side accountable as well. Counselors are less likely to put off a difficult file when the student can see exactly how long it has been sitting.
An Unexpected Advantage: Agility
Under the old process, a student might wait weeks for a review, receive an email they didn't fully understand, come back in to ask what it meant, and restart the clock — stretching a process that should take days into one that took weeks longer than it needed to.
It turned into a horrible loop. We've cut all of that out, and we now have the ability to communicate with the student inside the form itself.
Keisa Davis-Rezendes, Associate Director of Student Financial Services Bunker Hill Community College
With Softdocs, staff can send a form back to the student inside the same workflow with a specific correction noted. The communication lives in the form itself.
What the team didn't anticipate was how much owning their own forms would change their ability to respond to external pressures. The financial aid office builds and controls its own forms without waiting on IT. That turned out to matter more than anyone expected.
- Free community college in Massachusetts brought requirements that shifted day to day. The team updated forms in real time and pushed information to students quickly. Without that control, Glaze said they would have been buried in phone calls and emails.
- COVID vaccination collection came in as a phone call: you seem to be able to do this really quickly, can you build an uploader? They did, because the infrastructure was already there.
- Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) appeals evolved from a basic submission form into a guided experience with embedded video explaining what satisfactory academic progress means, a word count field to ensure substantive responses, a program-change indicator, and workshop referrals for students who needed advising support.
- SAP deadlines, previously nearly impossible to enforce on paper with a large frontline staff chasing submissions, are now enforced by simply turning the form off.
People realized how powerful it was to be able to create your own solution. You're not waiting on something else to be delivered or hoping that someone will design it for you. It's us in the offices that are creating the forms. We can respond to things very quickly.
Jillian Glaze, Senior Director of Student Financial Services Bunker Hill Community College
When other departments saw what the financial aid office had built with the federal work study contract — routing a form from a non-student originator to the student, back to staff, and back again — their response was direct: what else can you do with Softdocs?
What's Next for Bunker Hill Community College
All student-facing offices at Bunker Hill now use Softdocs for intake forms. Adding Softdocs Content was always part of the plan. The college wanted both pieces of the Etrieve platform from the beginning, but the financial investment required a longer-range timeline, and the migration itself was a significant undertaking.
The archive in Perceptive Content holds more than 15 years of records, with data going back to 2007, that needs cleaning before it can be moved. The go-live is underway. The move to Softdocs Content is not just about consolidation. The migration is also an opportunity to correct problems that built up in Perceptive Content over the years, including siloed access that prevented staff from seeing documents they needed.
Once the migration is complete, staff will have everything in one place rather than looking across four different systems to find a single document.
The financial aid team is already looking at what comes next: more video content embedded in forms, continued iteration on complex processes like special conditions and dependency overrides, and automations on the content side that will simplify pulling documents for audits.
There’s always some way we can get better or faster or make the student experience a little bit smoother or a little bit sleeker.
Jillian Glaze, Senior Director of Student Financial Services Bunker Hill Community College
The federal work study success opened a door. Other departments saw what was possible and asked what else can we do, and the team intends to answer that.
The metrics tell part of the story. The rest is what Bunker Hill has become: an office that did not just implement a platform, but built the institutional muscle to respond to anything, build anything, and keep getting better for the students who need it most.
Location
Boston, MA
Tags
