A Fair Review Your Committee Can Finish, and Will Come Back For

A 30-minute session for grantmakers and HR teams on asking less of every reviewer, keeping scoring consistent, and making decisions you can explain.

Grant committees, scholarship panels and employee award juries all run on the same thing: the time of people who said yes. They're board members, community volunteers, and employees who agreed to review on top of their regular jobs.

That time is limited. In the AmeriCorps and U.S. Census Bureau survey of volunteering in 2023, the median American volunteer gave about 24 hours over the entire year. A single review window can ask for close to that in a few weeks.

This session focuses on one of the five dimensions of Review Integrity, a framework for judging whether an application and review process is fair, consistent and defensible: Reviewer Calibration. Do your reviewers know exactly what they're scoring and how to weigh it, and does anyone notice when one of them scores much harder, or much faster, than the rest?

We'll also cover Decision Traceability: when a reviewer drops out halfway through, can you still reconstruct and defend how each decision was made?

When every reviewer reads every application, the work doesn't get spread evenly. Later applications get a tired skim. One reviewer finishes early, another never finishes, and their missing scores get dropped or estimated. An applicant near the cutoff can win or lose depending on who read their file.

The longer-term cost is the reviewers themselves. The most reliable ones are often the first to say they can't do it again, and each one who leaves takes years of program knowledge with them.

The best time to change how much you ask of reviewers is before the next cycle opens, while assignments, rounds and scorecards can still be set up differently.

In This 30-Minute Session, You'll Learn How To:

• Screen out ineligible applications automatically, so reviewers only see applicants who qualify
• Split the pool by program, fund, category or region, so each reviewer sees only what's meant for them
• Assign each reviewer a set number of applications, manually or at random, and cap how many anyone gets
• Shuffle the reading order, so the same applications aren't always read last
• Review in rounds with a separate scorecard for each, so the full committee reads only the finalists
• Put the application, files and video right beside a weighted scorecard, with no packets to download
• Send reviewers automatic reminders and see who's finished
• Spot harsh and lenient scorers with a normalization report before results are final
• Use AI-assisted summaries to help reviewers get oriented, while people make every decision

Who Should Attend

Program officers, grants managers and grants committee chairs at foundations and public funders, and HR, people-ops and total rewards teams who run employee scholarships, awards or employee grant programs. It's especially useful for anyone who recruits, coordinates or chases reviewers, or who has watched good reviewers burn out.

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

Common Questions

Is there a limit on how many reviewers we can add? No. Reviewr includes unlimited users, reviewers and applicants.

Some of our reviewers aren't comfortable with new software. Will that be a problem? Reviewers score from one screen with the application beside the scorecard. For anyone who prefers paper, there's a print-and-enter-scores option.

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

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.

About Reviewr

Founded in 2011, Reviewr is SOC 2 Type II certified and has processed more than 1 million applications for thousands of organizations.

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