One Record for Every Request, From First Submission to Final Report

A 30-minute session on running your grants, sponsorships, employee scholarships and awards from one place, so every giving decision is easy to find, explain and report.

Most corporate giving teams don't run their programs on one system. They run them on several. In a May 2026 study of 110 corporate giving teams, 95% said they manage CSR across four or more separate systems, and 51% use seven or more (Hanover Research for Bonterra).

This session is built around one of the five dimensions of Review Integrity, a framework for judging whether an application and review process is fair, consistent and defensible. That dimension is Decision Traceability: can any decision be reconstructed and defended?

When a request comes in through a form, gets screened in a spreadsheet, reviewed over email and logged somewhere else, the answer is usually "eventually." The pieces exist, but no single place holds the full story of why a grant was made.

That gap shows up when someone asks. An executive wants to know why one organization was funded and another wasn't. A community partner asks what it would take to qualify next year. Leadership wants this year's results in one report.

The same 2026 study found that only 13% of teams can produce a comprehensive CSR report in under two weeks, and 60% need three to four weeks.

Giving decisions are easiest to explain when the record is kept as the decision is made. Rebuilding it at reporting time is where the weeks go.

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

• Map every application-based program you run and the tools each one depends on
• Run grants, sponsorships, employee scholarships and awards on one platform, with one subscription that covers every program, user, reviewer and applicant
• Screen eligibility up front, so ineligible requests never reach your committee
• Give reviewers one link and a weighted scorecard instead of packets and spreadsheets
• Keep scores, comments and the reason for each decision with the application
• Track post-award steps like acceptance, e-signatures and follow-up reports in the same record
• Report across programs from one place, and export to the systems you already use
• Clone last year's program instead of rebuilding it

Who should attend

Corporate giving, CSR, community investment and corporate foundation staff, plus anyone who reviews requests or reports on giving results.

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