Essential tips to reviewing grant applications online
Reviewing grant applications is essential to the success of running an online grant program. As a grants program manager, it’s important to think about the experience and process for non administrators such as the applicants and the review committees.
When it comes to creating a review or evaluation process, it’s important to focus on developing a review workflow that fairly and accurately defines who the grant recipients are – but also in a way that is user friendly and engaging for the committee. Here is a sneak peak at how Reviewr powers this process.
In this webinar we discuss:
- Who is Reviewr?
- Leveraging technology to work smarter, not harder.
- Picking a review workflow that actually makes sense.
- One stop shopping – a centralized review workspace.
- Mixing and matching – combining scores with deliberation
Leveraging technology to work smarter, not harder when reviewing grant applications
- It’s 2020 – embrace the digital experience with an emphasis on experience
- Think of technology as your toolbelt is to a carpenter. It won’t build the house, but it can’t be built without it.
- Dedicated tools (like Reviewr) exist for a reason. Often combining tools in ways unintended will cause more harm than good for your program.
Picking a review workflow that actually makes sense when reviewing grant applications
- The most common options:
- All review members and judges review all submissions
- Review teams are formed as committees to evaluate groups of submissions
- Submissions are randomly assigned to review members
- Submissions are assigned to review members based on the volume of entries
- Role based – review members are assigned to submissions based on qualifications
- How can you accurately and efficiently create these workflows and mange them?
- Benefits of a multi-phase review workflow
- Avoid overworking the review teams
- Internal review and vetting narrows the pool of entries.
- Higher quality and specific reviews
- Think about the entire process
- Tabulating results
- Reassigning review teams to submissions
- Progress tracking
- Communication
- Deliberation
- etc
One stop shopping – a centralized review workspace when reviewing grant
- Dedicated review team portals
- Submission data
- Online evaluation and feedback
- Access to supporting documents and files
- Review team collaboration
- Side effects of a disconnected or offline process
- Increased time spent on task
- Inability to track progress
- Lost data and forgotten reviews
- Inaccurate results reporting
- Think long term – big picture
- Additional reviews
- Reporting
- Archiving
- Feedback sharing
Mix and match – combing scores with deliberation when reviewing grant applications
- Why is this important?
- Do scores tell the full story?
- Are all evaluations and review teams the same?
- Scores help power a review team deliberation
- What does this workflow look like?
- Multi-phase
- Share data in advance of deliberation meeting
- Data powered conversations
