Make Every Funding Decision Easy to Explain, Before Anyone Asks

A 30-minute session for foundations, nonprofits and associations on building a review process where every decision, the requests you fund and the ones you don't, comes with its own record.

Every funding cycle produces two sets of decisions: the requests you fund and the ones you don't. Most of a committee's time goes into the first set. The second usually gets a form email, while the reasons stay in the meeting.

This session is built around two of the five dimensions of Review Integrity, a framework for judging whether an application and review process is fair, consistent and defensible.

The first is Decision Traceability: can any decision be reconstructed and defended? If someone pointed to a request you funded, or one you declined, could you show the criteria it was scored against, how each reviewer scored it, and why another request was chosen instead?

The second is Loop Closure: do declined applicants hear something useful, and do this cycle's results shape next cycle's criteria?

When requests arrive by email, scores sit in a spreadsheet and the committee's reasoning lives in someone's notes, every question about a past decision has to be answered by rebuilding it. Board members can't see how decisions get made. Strong applicants stop applying because they never learned why they were turned down. And when the person who ran the process leaves, the reasons behind past decisions can leave too.

The record behind a decision has to be built while the review happens. The best time to set it up is before your next cycle opens, when you're deciding what the application asks, how requests are scored and who reviews them.

In this 30-minute session, you'll learn how to:

• Build application forms that ask each applicant to name the priority and need their request serves
• Screen out ineligible or incomplete requests before they reach your committee
• Score every request against the same weighted criteria, with the application and the scorecard side by side
• Decide which reviewers see which requests, so you can keep people off requests they're connected to
• Spot a harsh or lenient scorer before their scores tip the outcome
• Hide applicant names and other identifying form fields when you want a blind review
• Keep each request, its scores, reviewer comments and its final status together in one record
• Send every applicant, including the ones you declined, a clear and consistent message
• Download results and reports for your board packet
• Carry every applicant's history and your program setup into the next cycle, so the process doesn't depend on one person

Who Should Attend

Executive directors, grants and program managers, and board and committee members at hospital and health foundations, other nonprofit and private foundations, and associations that run grants, scholarships or awards. It's especially useful if one or two people run the whole process.

Common Questions

Does this apply to scholarships and awards, or just grants? All three. Any program where a committee reviews applications and decides who's selected runs into the same questions.

Does Reviewr pay grantees or track fund balances? No. Reviewr runs the application, review and selection, and collects reports and receipts after the award. It doesn't disburse funds or track fund balances, so your finance system stays the system of record. You can export a recipient report for your finance team.

Is Reviewr secure? Reviewr is SOC 2 Type II certified. It isn't a HIPAA-compliant system, so applications shouldn't collect patient health information.

We already decide in committee meetings. What changes? The meeting can stay. What changes is that each request's criteria, scores, reviewer comments and final status are captured as the review happens, so the record is there when someone asks later.

About Reviewr

Founded in 2011, Reviewr is SOC 2 Type II certified and has processed more than 1 million applications for thousands of organizations.