Scholarship Scraper (bold.org)

Scrape scholarship listings from bold.org — the largest single scholarship platform — into JSON, CSV or Excel. No login, no browser, no proxy.

Every row is a complete scholarship: award amount, number of awards, deadline, essay prompt, judging criteria, education levels, donor, and the number of people who have already applied — plus a computed applicantsPerAward ratio so you can see at a glance which awards are actually winnable.

Pay per result: $0.0005 per scholarship. No start fee — a run that returns nothing costs nothing, and scholarships removed by your filters are never charged.

What you can do with it

• Build a scholarship feed for a school, newsletter or app — crawl by-major, by-state, by-type and by-demographics categories and get a de-duplicated list.
• Find the winnable ones — sort your dataset by applicantsPerAward; a $1,000 award with 40 applicants beats a $10,000 award with 12,000.
• "Closing this month" lists — set deadlineBefore to the end of the month and openOnly: true.
• Filter by money — minAwardAmount: 5000 keeps only the serious awards.
• Search by topic — searchQuery: "nursing" finds the matching categories for you, so you do not have to know bold.org's category slugs.
• Prep essays in bulk — essayTopic gives the actual essay question(s) as plain text, with essayMinLength / essayMaxLength.
• Segment by audience — educationLevels: ["highschool"] for graduating seniors, ["graduate"] for grad students.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
categoryTypes	array	["by-major"]	Which category families to crawl: by-major, by-state, by-type, by-demographics, by-year
maxCategoryPages	integer	20	How many category pages to fetch (≈30 scholarships each)
maxResults	integer	200	Hard cap on rows returned — also your cost cap
startUrls	array	—	Specific bold.org category or individual scholarship URLs, instead of sitemap discovery
searchQuery	string	—	Free-text filter, e.g. nursing or first generation. Every word must appear in the name, description, category, slug or criteria (the word "scholarship" is ignored). Also crawls matching category pages first
openOnly	boolean	true	Drop scholarships whose deadline has passed (rolling deadlines are always kept)
minAwardAmount	integer	—	Minimum single-award size in USD
deadlineAfter	string	—	Only deadlines on/after this date (YYYY-MM-DD)
deadlineBefore	string	—	Only deadlines on/before this date (YYYY-MM-DD)
educationLevels	array	—	highschool, undergraduate, graduate
includeEssayPrompt	boolean	true	Include the essay question(s) as plain text

Example input

{
  "categoryTypes": ["by-major", "by-type"],
  "maxCategoryPages": 10,
  "maxResults": 200,
  "minAwardAmount": 1000,
  "deadlineBefore": "2026-12-31",
  "educationLevels": ["highschool"]
}

Sample output

{
  "name": "Pamela Branchini Memorial Scholarship",
  "slug": "pamela-branchini-memorial-scholarship",
  "url": "https://bold.org/scholarships/pamela-branchini-memorial-scholarship/",
  "description": "This scholarship seeks to honor the life of Pamela Branchini by supporting students who are pursuing degrees in the fine arts.",
  "category": "Arts",
  "deadline": "2026-11-05T23:59:59Z",
  "isRollingDeadline": false,
  "announcementDate": "2026-12-06T00:00:00.000Z",
  "awardAmount": 1000,
  "awardAmounts": [1000, 1000],
  "totalAwardAmount": 2000,
  "numberOfAwards": 2,
  "numberOfApplicants": 665,
  "applicantsPerAward": 332.5,
  "educationLevels": ["highSchool", "undergraduate", "graduate"],
  "acceptsHighSchool": true,
  "criteria": ["Ambition", "Need", "Boldest Bold.org Profile"],
  "requiresEssay": true,
  "essayTopic": "Tell us about a piece of art you made and what it means to you.",
  "essayMinLength": 400,
  "essayMaxLength": 600,
  "isMultiYear": false,
  "donorName": "Dan Branchini and the Glitter Team at Community Lutheran",
  "donorProfileUrl": "https://bold.org/profile/bruce-ewing/",
  "imageUrl": "https://static.bold.org/pamelabranchinimemorialscholarship....jpeg",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-06T19:31:45.646Z",
  "updatedAt": "2026-09-10T00:40:38.001Z",
  "sourceUrl": "https://bold.org/scholarships/by-major/art-scholarships/",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-10T10:21:03.552Z"
}

FAQ

Do I need a proxy or a browser? No. bold.org ships the full scholarship records inside the initial HTML response, so this Actor is plain HTTP — fast, cheap and it runs fine on the smallest memory setting.

How many scholarships can I get? One category page yields about 30 complete records in a single request, and there are 500+ category pages across the five category families. Raise maxCategoryPages and maxResults together; results are de-duplicated by scholarship ID across categories, so overlapping categories never bill you twice for the same scholarship.

Why did I get fewer rows than maxResults? Either the crawl ran out of category pages (raise maxCategoryPages), or your filters removed them. The log prints how many records were found and how many survived filtering on every page. Filtered-out records are not charged.

What is applicantsPerAward? numberOfApplicants / numberOfAwards, rounded to one decimal — bold.org publishes the live applicant count, so this is a real competitiveness signal, not an estimate. It is null when either number is unavailable.

Is the data live? Yes, each run fetches the pages fresh. updatedAt is bold.org's own last-modified timestamp for the scholarship, and scrapedAt is when we read it.

Is this allowed? Only public pages are read, and only paths that bold.org's robots.txt permits — it disallows query-string URLs (Disallow: /*?*), so this Actor never requests one. No login, no personal data about applicants: the applicant count is a public number on the listing page.

How does this compare to other bold.org scrapers? Depth. This Actor returns ~28 typed fields per scholarship — including numberOfAwards, numberOfApplicants, applicantsPerAward, the essay prompt(s), judging criteria and donor — versus the 11 fields typical of other bold.org Actors, where amount is usually a plain string with no award-count or applicant data at all. All four filters (searchQuery, minAwardAmount, deadlineAfter/deadlineBefore, educationLevels) are verified against real runs: each one measurably changes which rows come back, not just a passthrough flag.

Can I scrape one specific scholarship? Yes — put its page URL in startUrls, e.g. https://bold.org/scholarships/chris-jackson-scholarship/.