Emerging Trends and Technology for Grantmakers

Emerging Trends and Technology in Grantmaking

A practical look at what's actually changing in grant review — from applicant experience through scoring, fairness, and what happens after the award.

Funding Gets Awarded. Sometimes the Review Never Happened.

Every stage of a grant program generates its own kind of mess — applications lost in inboxes, reviewers scoring on different scales, reports that never come back. This session walks through what changes at each stage, including where automation and AI genuinely help, and where they don't.

Old Way

• Applications lost in spreadsheets and email chains
• The same reviewers score the same first few entries every cycle
• Numeric scorecards make 16 vs. 17 a real disagreement
• Reporting starts from a blank page after the grant ends

New Way

• Every application and reference lands in one connected profile
• A randomized, capacity-based queue spreads the workload fairly
• Emotional-scale scorecards normalize for each reviewer's tendencies
• Reporting expectations are set the day the award is made

What We'll Cover

Six Things Worth Changing About Grant Review

Where Automation Helps (and Where AI Needs a Human)

The real difference between smart automation and true AI-assisted decisions — and where full automation gets risky.

Applicant Personas & Eligibility Matching

Short intake questions that route applicants to the grants they actually qualify for.

References Without the Blank Page

Guided templates replace the cold "write me a letter" ask.

Review Capacity & the Randomized Queue

A threshold-based model that shares reviewer workload without duplicating it.

Scoring That Accounts for Tough Graders

Emotional-scale scorecards and normalization for each reviewer's tendencies.

Reporting Set Up at the Time of the Award

Post-award templates and one-click dashboards, not a blank page later.

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