If you were out for a month, what would happen to your grant cycle? For many grantmakers, the honest answer depends on one person: the one who knows where the applications are, which spreadsheet holds the scores, and why each grant was made. When that person steps away, eligibility checks stop, reviewers stop getting reminders, and reports go uncollected.
In this on-demand session, Reviewr shows how to build a grant program anyone on the team can run and defend. It works through three sets of moves: building the process into the application itself with eligibility screening, weighted rubrics, and automatic reviewer reminders; keeping the record so every proposal, score, comment, and post-award report is tied to one submission; and making the program something anyone can pick up, with unlimited users, a cloned event each year, and a dedicated support person. The session is built for grant programs, but the same moves apply to any scholarship, award, or application-based program. It closes with a live demo of the admin experience inside Reviewr, plus a bonus walkthrough of the applicant experience.
Most teams running grants, scholarships, and awards are small, usually one to three people, and for many of them the program isn't their main job. It's a seasonal responsibility stacked on top of their regular duties and fit into lunch breaks, evenings, and weekends. Those small teams also change: in the Council on Foundations' 2025 Grantmaker Salary and Benefits Report, 57% of responding grantmakers reported staff departures. A hand-off isn't a question of if, but when.
The session names five places a grant program hides where no one else can see it:
When one person is out, the program stops, and the reasons leave with them. That costs the program in three ways:
Most grant and scholarship programs aim to open on January 1. By late October and early November, boards, committees, leadership, and donors have usually met to set the year's expectations: how much funding there is to distribute, which new grants to offer, what worked last year and what didn't, and what the community needs now. This is when those expectations turn into a real form. November and December are for finalizing and testing it, and once the round opens, questions from applicants and judges arrive all at once. It's also the point at which a program built around one person is hardest to hand off.
The session frames the fix through Review Integrity, five questions every grant 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. Turn eligibility rules into screening questions (Intake Proportionality). Nearly every grant has eligibility rules, so build them into the form. Based on their answers to a short series of questions, eligible applicants continue down the path they selected, and ineligible applicants are stopped before they fill out an entire application they can't win. That saves applicants time and saves admins from sorting every application by hand.
2. Give each stage its own weighted rubric (Rubric Clarity). Programs with multiple rounds of scoring can use an early stage to narrow the pool and a later stage to go deeper. Programs running several grants in one cycle can give each grant its own rubric, since each fund asks different questions. When most of the scoring should stay the same, copy the rubric and adjust it. Many teams already use weighted scorecards but apply the weights by hand. In Reviewr, the weight is assigned once and the math is done automatically.
3. Stop chasing reviewers from one inbox (Reviewer Calibration). Reviewers score with the submission and the evaluation form side by side, with every file in one tab. Admins can assign all submissions to all judges, assign judges manually, or let the system assign them automatically using minimum and maximum counts. Reminders go out automatically, so no one has to nudge reviewers one by one.
4. Keep every grant decision in one record (Decision Traceability). The proposal, eligibility answers, files, scores, comments, and final decision are all connected to one submission. Admins can click into any submission to see everything together, or download a report with every submission and everything tied to it.
5. Track everything after the award, not just the award. Acceptance forms, agreements, receipts, and impact reports can all be automated and connected to the original submission. Grantees log in, see exactly what they need to complete, and submit, with reminders sent automatically.
6. See each grantee's history and give your board the results (Loop Closure). When the program runs in one place year after year, it builds a history: whether a grantee has been funded before, how large each grant was, and what they've applied for in past cycles. That history is valuable for board reporting, donor conversations, and promoting the program, and any report is a download away at any point in the cycle.
7. Make the program something anyone can pick up. Users are unlimited, so anyone helping run the program can have access, and anyone who leaves can be removed and replaced. Every account gets a dedicated customer success team member who helps new team members get set up and trained. Each year, the event can be cloned exactly, including every form, evaluation, automation, email, configuration, and visibility condition, so time goes into improving last year's program instead of rebuilding it. Programs already mid-cycle can import existing submissions.
The same question, two ways. "Why did we fund this grantee three years ago?" When the program lives in one head, the answer is "I'm not sure": it's in a spreadsheet no one can find, the committee notes are in a former employee's email, and the person who decided has moved on. When everything lives in one shared place, the full application, eligibility answers, files, every score against the weighted rubric, and the committee's reasoning in a comment are all on file, and the answer is "Here's exactly why."
A five-question self-check. Are your eligibility rules built into the application itself? Is your rubric weighted and published before anyone applies? Could someone else send reviewer reminders next week? Could anyone explain why a grant from three years ago was made? Could someone else see which grantees still owe a report?
Common questions. Reviewr doesn't pay grantees or distribute funds, so programs keep using their current payment process. Setup averages about 30 days, but the timeline is up to each program: after onboarding with the sales team, a customer success team member helps build the program, and it goes live whenever the team is ready. Programs already mid-cycle can import their submissions. And small teams, even a team of one, benefit most: users and reviewers are unlimited, so board members can join, and every user can reach the Reviewr team directly with system questions.
Reviewr is an application management platform founded about 15 years ago by a team that had been part of an application process that wasn't working. Grants and scholarships are big decisions that can determine whether a small business stays open or a student goes to college, so Reviewr was built to give every applicant a fair, equal shot at the funding they deserve. Today it hosts thousands of programs each year, keeps releasing new features and enhancements, and gives every account a dedicated one-on-one Reviewr team member for support.
The all-in-one platform for managing scholarships, grants and awards programs.
