The Scholar Snapp solution was developed by an idea sparked and funded by the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. A workgroup was formed under the National Scholarship Providers Association (NSPA) with members carefully selected to represent many perspectives from the scholarship industry. Workgroup members at the time the standard, or Scholar Snapp, was released were:

• Boettcher Foundation
• Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation
• Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation
• FastWeb
• George Snow Scholarship Fund
• Hispanic Scholarship Fund
• Michael & Susan Dell Foundation
• Minnesota Community Foundation/The St. Paul Foundation
• National Scholarship Providers Association
• Oregon Student Assistance Commission
• Scholarship America
• Senator George J. Mitchell Scholarship
• University of Texas at Austin, Student Financial Services

The Scholar Snapp solution was released as an open standard so that any organization can automatically read an application by writing software that conforms to the standard file format. A student’s answers are saved to an XML file that conforms to the schema, compressed, and named with the file extension ‘SDS’. The Scholar Snapp solution does not define the business processes or communication mechanisms for transmitting and receiving SDS files, only the structure and contents of the file.