Turn Grantee Reports Into Better Funding Decisions

A 30-minute session for grantmakers on the year after the award: tracking what grantees owe, hearing what they accomplished, and bringing those results into your next funding decision.

Most of the work in a grant cycle goes into the decision. The year after it usually gets far less attention.

Grantees notice. In the Center for Effective Philanthropy's grantee surveys (2021), grantees estimated they spend 30 hours or more on reporting over the life of a typical grant, yet only about 60% said they had discussed the report they submitted with anyone at their funder.

On a small grants team, the follow-through often runs from one inbox: agreements to sign, progress reports to chase, receipts to match, final reports to file. Some come back late, some never come back, and the ones that do arrive as PDFs in different formats.

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 Loop Closure: do the results your grantees report actually change what you fund next, or do the reports get filed and forgotten?

The second is Decision Traceability: when a grantee applies for renewal, can your reviewers see what happened with the last grant, and could you explain the decision either way?

When the follow-through lives in one inbox, renewals get decided on memory instead of results. A grantee who missed every report gets funded again because nobody connected the two, while one that delivered everything it promised never hears that anyone noticed.

And when the board asks what the grants accomplished, the answer exists but is scattered across attachments, so someone rebuilds it by hand, if it gets told at all.

Grant programs run on fiscal years and letter-of-inquiry cycles. The reporting requirements, due dates and renewal criteria you set before your next round opens decide whether next year's results come back in a form you can use.

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

• Set up each grant's post-award steps (signed agreement, progress reports, receipts, final report) as tracked tasks with due dates
• Send automatic reminders when a report is due, instead of chasing grantees one email at a time
• See at a glance which grantees are current and which are behind
• Keep each grantee's applications, scores, agreements and reports in one profile across cycles
• Score renewal requests with a weighted rubric that asks how the last grant went
• Respond to grantees with consistent email templates, so good work gets acknowledged
• Download results and reports from the reports page for your board packet

Who should attend

Program officers, grants managers, executive directors and grants committee chairs at private, family, community and corporate foundations, and at public funders. It's especially useful for small teams that run the whole grant cycle themselves, and for anyone preparing a renewal round or a year-end board report.

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

Common questions

Does Reviewr pay grantees? No. Reviewr tracks acceptance, signed agreements, receipts and grantee reports. It doesn't disburse funds or track fund balances. You can export a recipient report for your finance team or CRM.

Can we bring in grants we've already awarded? Yes. Reviewr can import a program that's already underway, so current grantees' follow-up can move over without waiting for a new cycle.

How long does setup take? About 30 days. Reviewr builds the program from your existing forms, so you don't have to start from scratch.

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