If a board member or executive asked why one organization was funded and another wasn't, how many tools would you open to answer? For many corporate giving teams, the request is in an inbox, eligibility is in a spreadsheet, scores are in an email thread, the decision is in a shared drive, and the follow-up is in one person's head. Each extra place makes the answer slower and harder to defend.
In this on-demand session, Reviewr shows corporate giving teams how to bring intake, screening, review, decisions, and follow-up into one record. It works through eight moves: mapping every program and its tools, running every program in one place, screening eligibility first, writing and weighting criteria, giving reviewers one link and a scorecard, keeping the whole story of a decision with the request, tracking post-award steps in the same record, and reporting from the record before reusing the program next year. The same moves apply to community grants, sponsorships, employee scholarships, awards, or any other program. The session closes with a live demo of the judging experience inside Reviewr.
A September 2026 Bonterra survey of 110 corporate CSR leaders, conducted by Hanover Research, found that 95% manage CSR across four or more separate systems and 51% use seven or more. None described their systems as fully integrated. Only 13% could produce a comprehensive CSR report in under two weeks (Bonterra, The Integrated CSR Report, 2026).
The session traces that to a familiar five-tool stack:
The visible cost is time: when the record is scattered, the report takes weeks. The bigger cost is that no single place holds the full story of a decision, and that costs programs in three ways:
Next year's giving budget is being decided this fall. September and October are kickoff season, when placeholders go in and budget lines for next year's programs get drafted. October and November bring approval, when boards and leadership decide whether each program is a go. Programs that can show results are easier to fund. At the same time, teams are planning next year's process: improving last year's form and getting ready to go live by January 1.
The session frames the fix through Review Integrity, five questions every giving process should be able to answer, in the order a real program runs:
Each dimension moves up a four-stage ladder, from Ad hoc to Documented to Calibrated to Instrumented.
1. Map what you run. List every program, whether community grants, corporate giving, sponsorships, employee scholarships, or awards, and the tools each one depends on: platforms, PDFs, inboxes, spreadsheets. Count the tools per program and overall. If you're using more than one, the answer to "could someone pick this up if I left today?" is probably no.
2. Run every program in one place. Even a single corporate giving program run twice a year should run the same way each time, so applicants know what to expect instead of facing an easy process one year and a confusing one the next. Separate platforms also mean separate accounts for applicants, plus more emails that end up in spam. One place means one consistent process, no matter the program or time of year.
3. Screen eligibility first (Intake Proportionality). Put simple yes-or-no eligibility questions on the first page. Eligible applicants move through the form. Ineligible applicants are told why and can't continue, so no one spends time on an application they never qualified for. Without that screen, admins sort through every request by hand, or, more often, judges end up doing it. Judges are usually volunteers donating their time to score and decide, and they shouldn't also have to serve as the eligibility committee.
4. Write, weight, and publish your criteria (Rubric Clarity). In Reviewr, programs build the evaluation criteria during setup, before going live, so the scorecard lines up directly with the application form. Focus on the questions that yield clear, factual answers on the application. Then use the goals set at the start of the year to decide which criteria should make or break a decision and which should support it, and weight them accordingly.
5. Give reviewers one link and a scorecard, not a packet (Reviewer Calibration). In many programs today, reviewers get a zip file of PDFs by email, type scores into a reply or a spreadsheet, and someone copies them into a master sheet while comments stay in the thread. In one place, reviewers see only the requests assigned to them, with the application and scorecard side by side, weighted criteria built in, and scores and comments saved to the request. Since most reviewers are volunteers, a good experience brings them back, and reviewers who like the process often tell people in their own networks to apply.
6. Keep the whole story of a decision with the request (Decision Traceability). The request, eligibility, scores, comments, and final decision all live together, with the application tied to its evaluations. Reviewer comments make decisions more defensible and give applicants who want to know what put them a step behind the strongest request a real answer.
7. Track every post-award step in the same record. Acceptance forms, e-signatures, impact reports, and receipts can be added as supplemental forms sent automatically to recipients once they're marked as awarded. Recipients log in to the same place as their original application, submit what's needed, and they're done. Admins don't fall back to email and PDFs after the decision. Every user's experience affects the others: a better process for admins means a better one for applicants and judges, and the reverse.
8. Report from the record and reuse the program next year (Loop Closure). Use Reviewr's reports to see which questions drew strong answers, which didn't, and what to add or remove. Then copy the event into next year: every form question, evaluation, configuration, and automation carries over, and you update dates, deadlines, and emails. Time that used to go to rebuilding goes to refining the program instead.
"Why did you sponsor them and not us?" Two ways. With five tools: find the request in the inbox, hope to find the eligibility row in a sheet, search email for the committee's scores, ask who was in the meeting, and reply a week later without a real reason. Every piece you can't find makes the decision a little less defensible. With one record: open both requests, compare scores on the same criteria, review the comments, see each decision, and reply the same day, realistically within ten minutes, with a clear, defensible reason.
A five-question self-check. Can you list every giving program you run and the tools each one uses? Are ineligible requests screened out before anyone reviews them? Are your criteria written, weighted, and published? Could you explain any one decision today without asking a colleague? Can you produce last year's giving report in under two weeks?
Common questions. Setup averages about 30 days but runs on your timeline: you can start building in Reviewr while meetings with the team are scheduled. Reviewr doesn't send payments, so programs keep their current payment vendor. Reviewr doesn't sync live with CRMs, but data exports, including a mapped recipient report, can be brought into a CRM. For IT review, Reviewr is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and supports single sign-on.
Reviewr is an application management platform founded in 2011 by a team that had been through application processes that didn't work for applicants, judges, or admins. Grants, sponsorships, scholarships, and awards can make a real difference in people's lives, so Reviewr was built to give everyone involved a better process and every applicant a fair chance. Today it runs thousands of programs each year for companies, foundations, associations, banks, credit unions, and more. Applications, judging, follow-up, and reporting all live in one place, and every account gets a dedicated one-on-one Reviewr team member for support.
The all-in-one platform for managing scholarships, grants and awards programs.
