The JFK Library Foundation, in partnership with the Earthshot Prize, launched the Earthshot Innovation Challenge: Northeast U.S. Edition to accelerate breakthrough climate solutions across the region. The initiative invites innovators, entrepreneurs, researchers, students, and mission-driven organizations to submit high-impact environmental solutions aligned with key Earthshot categories such as Fix Our Climate and Build a Waste-Free World.
To administer this large-scale innovation challenge—collecting extensive proposal data, managing hundreds of applicants, assigning submissions to expert reviewers, and capturing post-award impact— the JFK Library Foundation selected Reviewr as its end-to-end applicant management and evaluation platform.
Launching a regional edition of a high-visibility climate innovation prize required a robust, secure, and configurable platform. Key challenges included:
The submission form required detailed data across multiple sections, including:
Challenge administrators needed a way to securely collect, store, structure, and evaluate this information without manual processing.
The JFK Library Foundation anticipated significant participation from climate-tech startups, nonprofits, universities, and mission-based innovators—requiring a scalable system capable of handling complex uploads, long-form narrative responses, and diverse attachments.
Solutions had to map to one or more Earthshots, and the platform needed to categorize entries accordingly while maintaining rigorous compliance, security, and data privacy standards.
Submissions required review by subject-matter experts across environmental science, clean energy, community resilience, equity, sustainability, and climate-tech.
Each focus area needed:
Selected innovators must submit impact data, progress updates, metrics, and reporting deliverables over time—requiring multi-phase submission workflows and sustained data tracking.
The JFK Library Foundation used Reviewr to power the full lifecycle of the Earthshot Innovation Challenge—from initial nomination through ongoing measurement of funded innovations.
Reviewr provided a dynamic online portal tailored to the challenge’s data requirements. Applicants completed a structured, intuitive application capturing:
Reviewr handled long-form narrative fields, numeric inputs, multi-select Earthshot mapping, geographic details, financial forms, and more.
Reviewr automatically sorted each submission into Earthshot-aligned categories or thematic problem areas based on program logic (e.g., Fix Our Climate, Protect and Restore Nature, etc.).
This eliminated manual sorting and enabled each category’s review committee to access only the proposals relevant to their domain.
Each review category had:
Reviewr’s randomized assignment engine ensured that each submission received equal, unbiased evaluation while preventing reviewer overload.
Reviewers accessed proposals through a split-screen interface, enabling direct side-by-side reading and scoring.
Administrators leveraged:
These ensured rigor, fairness, and transparency across all judging phases.
Once the regional committees selected their finalists, Reviewr facilitated additional phases of review for:
Selected climate innovators used Reviewr’s profile-based multi-phase workflows to submit:
This allowed the JFK Library Foundation to measure how funded innovations continued to deliver value and climate impact over time.
Through Reviewr, the JFK Library Foundation empowered a modern, data-driven innovation challenge capable of supporting climate-forward solutions at scale. The platform ensured that every applicant—regardless of organization size—had a clear, equitable path to participate. Review committees gained the tools needed for fair, rigorous evaluation, and the Foundation gained lasting visibility into innovation outcomes.
The Earthshot Innovation Challenge now operates with efficiency, transparency, and impact measurement tools aligned with the program’s mission to accelerate breakthrough environmental solutions across the Northeast and beyond.
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