Every grant cycle produces a lot of information: applications, eligibility answers, reviewer scores, committee notes, award letters, progress reports, and receipts. But when the board asks which grants moved your priorities forward last year and why those applicants were chosen, that information is often spread across a form tool, a scoring spreadsheet, a shared drive, and someone's inbox. The answer exists. Pulling it together is the hard part.
In this on-demand session, Reviewr walks grantmakers through six practical moves for turning applications, scores, and grant reports into answers a board can use, starting with the next round: screen eligibility up front, ask for what you'll report on, score each grant with its own weighted rubric, keep one profile per grantee, collect reports as tracked tasks, and turn results into the next board packet. The same moves apply to scholarships, awards, and calls for entries.
The session opens with a poll: how long would it take you to defend past award decisions with reliable data? Most attendees answered somewhere between a day and more than a week. That gap matters, because a defensible answer is only useful if you can get to it when someone asks.
Many grantmakers are working on both ends of the process. According to the TAG 2024 State of Philanthropy Tech Survey, 67% of grantmaking organizations are still working to streamline their applications, and 56% are still working to streamline grantee reporting, the back-end record of what was funded and how those decisions were made.
The session frames all of this through Review Integrity, a five-dimension standard for running a fair, defensible review process, from what you ask applicants to how each cycle informs the next: Intake Proportionality, Rubric Clarity, Reviewer Calibration, Decision Traceability, and Loop Closure. It goes deepest on two of them: Decision Traceability and Loop Closure.
1. How many places your grant data lives. Many organizations run several grant programs, or a mix of grants, scholarships, and calls for entries, that are similar but run at different times of year with different questions. The result is a little of everything: different form tools, a spreadsheet trying to pull reviewer scores and committee notes together by hand (with plenty of room for human error), agreements and award letters in a shared drive that more people can access than need to, and progress reports and receipts in someone else's inbox. A useful test: if you had to take a leave of absence, could someone step in and pick up the program with little to no context? If the program lives in your head and in four different places, it would likely stall.
2. The questions you're already being asked. Boards want to know what last year's grants accomplished. Renewal reviewers need to know what grantees reported last year. Declined applicants want to know what they could do better next time. And donors and auditors want to know why a grant was made. Without reports, impact information, and judges' comments in one place, there's no reliable way to answer any of them.
3. What scattered data costs. The cost isn't always upfront, but it comes back around. Scattered data becomes an impact story nobody can tell. Judge packets get rebuilt by hand each year, or not at all, and inconsistent scoring from year to year and program to program creates an unfair process for applicants and a poor experience for judges, who are usually volunteers deciding whether to come back and recruit others. Without a consistent scorecard, applicants can't tell how to apply. Renewals get decided in the dark, without last year's report in front of reviewers. And criteria never learn: results get filed, and the next round asks the same questions. With the next grant period approaching, now is when those hidden costs start to add up.
4. The five Review Integrity questions. Intake Proportionality asks whether what you ask scales to what's at stake, and whether each question is worth asking. Rubric Clarity asks whether criteria are written, weighted, and visible before anyone applies; the rubric should be built alongside the application so the two line up, and shared so applicants know what matters most. Reviewer Calibration asks whether judges are trained and have the resources they need, including the goals your team set for this year's program. Decision Traceability asks whether any decision can be reconstructed and defended, with every past application tied to its evaluation and comments. Loop Closure asks whether each cycle's reports and feedback are used to make the next one better and grow the number of completed applications.
5. Move 1: Turn eligibility rules into screening questions (Decision Traceability). Add an eligibility page at the start of the form. Eligible applicants move through, and ineligible applicants are stopped at the front, so no one completes an entire submission only to learn they don't qualify, and no one on staff has to sift through applications to decide who's eligible. It's a small configuration change that protects your reputation and gives applicants clear visibility.
6. Move 2: Ask for what you'll report on from the first application (Loop Closure). Build application questions with your reporting in mind. Ask what will help you decide who receives funds and what you'll need to answer board questions later, and cut the filler. If your board will ask about results by focus area, ask for the focus area on the application.
7. Move 3: Score each grant with its own weighted rubric (Decision Traceability). Every grant needs its own scorecard so applications are compared fairly, and some stages may need their own as well. Weight what matters most: if community impact is the make-or-break factor, weight it at 30%; if chamber membership matters but isn't a deal-breaker, weight it at 10%, so it shapes the score without deciding the outcome. In Reviewr, you build the questions, assign point values, and set weights with a click, with no extra spreadsheet or manual math. Judges score right beside the application instead of juggling tabs, downloads, and emails, which keeps volunteers coming back.
8. Move 4: Keep one profile per grantee across every cycle. Applicants create one profile that carries across every year and every program. When they apply again, or apply to another program, they can see every application they've submitted in one familiar place, and you keep a continuous record of each grantee over time.
9. Move 5: Collect reports and receipts as tracked tasks (Loop Closure). Collect progress reports and receipts inside the program instead of over email, and download reports at any point in the cycle with a click. Use them to see what worked: which questions drew strong answers, where applicants dropped off, and which questions created a barrier. Small changes to the form each year lead to better answers and more completed submissions.
10. Move 6: Turn results into the board packet for the next round. Because everything lives in one system, question types and responses format cleanly into reports with applicant and evaluation information side by side. That gives your board a defensible answer for any decision, and gives you the starting point for improving next year's program.
11. One board question, two ways. Take the question, "What did last year's youth grants accomplish?" The scattered way: search the form tool, the email PDFs, or the drive folder for youth applications; match them to scores in a hand-built spreadsheet from last year; dig progress reports out of the inbox and read each PDF for the numbers; then build the slide the night before. The connected way: the focus area was asked on the application, scores sit with each grant, reports answer the same goal questions, and you download results, sort by focus area, and walk in showing what was promised versus what was delivered.
12. Planning your next round. With the next round of grants and scholarships coming up, map the questions your board, applicants, and community will ask, the data you need to answer each one, and when to collect it, so the answers are built in from the start.
13. A five-question self-check for your grant program. Do ineligible requests stop before a reviewer reads them? Are your criteria written and weighted before the round opens? Do renewal reviewers see last year's report? Can you show why any grant this year was made? Did last year's results change this year's questions?
14. Common questions. Setup runs on your timeline: after an onboarding meeting with a Reviewr team member, you can build everything yourself with guidance, chat support, and meetings as needed. Past cycles can come with you, since grant records and past submissions can be imported, including into a past event that holds historical applications. Reviewr doesn't pay grantees; fund disbursement stays with your organization. And grantee data is secure, since Reviewr is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant.
Reviewr is an application management platform founded in 2011 by a team who had lived through application processes that didn't work for anyone involved, from applicants to admins to judges. Today it runs thousands of grants, scholarships, awards, and calls for entries each year for community foundations, banks, credit unions, associations, and more. Applications, judging, 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.
