Answer Every Donation and Sponsorship Request Fairly, and Turn Down the Rest Kindly

A 30-minute session for organizations that get community requests, on three rules that decide who gets a yes, how fast everyone hears back and why.

Nonprofits raised more than a third of their 2025 revenue in the last three months of the year, with December the biggest month, according to the Blackbaud Institute's 2025 Trends in Giving. The organizations they ask feel it: school auctions, galas, 5Ks, food drives and youth teams, all asking for donations and sponsorships at once.

The requests come by email, through a contact form, at the front desk and through a colleague who promised to pass one along. At most associations, credit unions, banks and companies, one person handles them on top of another job, and the criteria live in that person's head.

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 Rubric Clarity: are your criteria written, weighted and visible before someone asks? When they aren't, requests get decided one at a time, and the ones that arrive first or come through the right person tend to win.

The second is Loop Closure: do the people you turn down get a real answer, and does what you learn change next year's criteria? A late, vague no tells a requester nothing about whether to ask again.

Without rules, the person running the program spends the busiest weeks of the year answering email. Groups you decline hear nothing, or hear it late with no reason, and in a community they're also your members, customers and neighbors. And when someone asks why one group was funded over another, there's no record to point to.

Giving budgets are usually set once a year. The rules for spending them often aren't set at all, and every request that arrives before they are gets decided the old way.

In This 30-Minute Session, You'll Learn How To:

• Publish your giving criteria and give every requester one way to ask
• Put screening questions up front, so a requester knows in a minute whether they fit
• Review requests in set rounds, with a committee and a weighted scorecard, instead of one at a time
• Send every requester an acknowledgment and status updates automatically
• Decline the same way every time: promptly, kindly, with a reason and a note about when to apply next
• Keep a record of why each request was funded or declined

You'll also see how Reviewr's team builds your request process from the forms you already use, in about 30 days.

Who Should Attend

Marketing, community relations and foundation staff at associations, credit unions, banks and companies who handle donation, sponsorship and small-grant requests, plus the committee members and executives who approve them.

FAQ

Does Reviewr send donations or sponsorship payments?No. Reviewr runs the request, review and follow-up, such as receipts and reports from the groups you fund. It doesn't send payments or track budgets. You can export a recipient report for your finance team.

We only get a few dozen requests a year. Is this for us?Yes. The three rules work at any volume, and the same setup can also run your scholarships, grants or awards.

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