Community Giving Your Board, CFO and Members Can Trust

Every credit union that gives back eventually gets asked why it funded one request and not another. This 30-minute session shows how to build a donation, sponsorship and scholarship process that answers that question before anyone asks.

Community giving is one of the clearest ways a credit union lives out "people helping people." It's also usually run by one person with another job, in marketing, community development or the credit union's foundation. Donation and sponsorship requests arrive by email, by mail and at the branch counter. A committee of employees or board members, who often know the applicants, reviews the scholarship applications. The scores, notes and final decisions end up in a spreadsheet.

Then someone asks: a nonprofit that was turned down, a parent whose student didn't win, a board member, an auditor or the CFO. Why did we fund that?

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 any gift or scholarship you awarded this year, could you show the request, the criteria and why it was approved?

The second is Reviewer Calibration: does every request get scored the same way, by people without a conflict, with their scores checked against each other?

Without a clear record, a giving program built on goodwill becomes something you have to defend. In a small community, the organization that was declined and the student who didn't win are also members and neighbors.

And because community giving doesn't bring in loan or deposit revenue, leadership wants to know what it returns. A list of checks written doesn't answer that. Reports back from the organizations and students you funded do.

Giving budgets are set once a year, and the process behind them usually carries over without anyone deciding on it. The best time to fix the process is before the next budget is spent.

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

• Take every donation, sponsorship and scholarship request through one link, with criteria questions that screen out what you don't fund
• Verify membership before a scholarship application reaches your committee
• Route requests by category or branch region to the right reviewers
• Hide applicant names and other identifying form fields from your committee
• Score every request against a written, weighted rubric beside the application
• See which reviewers score harder or easier than the rest before you finalize decisions
• Send acknowledgment and status emails automatically, from your credit union's own domain
• Collect acceptance forms, receipts and impact reports from the organizations and students you fund

Who should attend

Marketing, community development and foundation staff at credit unions who run donation and sponsorship requests, scholarships or educator grants, plus the giving committee members, executives and board members who approve them.

Can't make it live? Register anyway and we'll send you the recording.

Common questions

Does Reviewr send donations or scholarship payments?No. Reviewr tracks acceptance, proof of enrollment, receipts and impact reports. It doesn't disburse funds or track fund balances. You can export a recipient report for your finance team.

Is Reviewr secure enough for a financial institution?Reviewr is SOC 2 Type II certified and supports single sign-on. Your credit union owns its data and can export it.

We only run a few scholarships. Is this for us?Yes. Most credit unions run several kinds of giving: scholarships, donation and sponsorship requests, and educator grants. The session covers how to run them all through one consistent process.

About Reviewr

Founded in 2011, Reviewr has processed more than 1 million applications for thousands of organizations.

‍