Essential tips to reviewing award, grant, and scholarship applications

Reviewing award, grant, and scholarship applications

Reviewing award, grant, and scholarship applications is essential to the success of running an award, grant, or scholarship program. As a program manager, it’s important to think about the experience and process for non administrators such as the applicants or the review committees.

When it comes to creating a review or evaluation process, it’s important to focus on developing a review workflow that fairly and accurately defines who the award, grant, or scholarship recipients are – but also in a way that is user friendly and engaging for the committee. Here is a sneak peak at how Reviewr powers this process.

In this webinar we discuss:

• Who is Reviewr?
• Leveraging technology to work smarter, not harder.
• Picking a review workflow that actually makes sense.
• One stop shopping – a centralized review workspace.
• Mixing and matching – combining scores with deliberation

Leveraging technology to work smarter, not harder when reviewing award, grant, and scholarship applications.

• It’s 2020 – embrace the digital experience with an emphasis on experience
• Think of technology as your toolbelt is to a carpenter. It won’t build the house, but it can’t be built without it.
• Dedicated tools (like Reviewr) exist for a reason. Often combining tools in ways unintended will cause more harm than good for your program.

Picking a review workflow that actually makes sense when reviewing award, grant, and scholarship applications.

• The most common options:
  • All review members and judges review all submissions
  • Review teams are formed as committees to evaluate groups of submissions
  • Submissions are randomly assigned to review members
  • Submissions are assigned to review members based on the volume of entries
  • Role based – review members are assigned to submissions based on qualifications
• How can you accurately and efficiently create these workflows and mange them?
• Benefits of a multi-phase review workflow
  • Avoid overworking the review teams
  • Internal review and vetting narrows the pool of entries.
  • Higher quality and specific reviews
• Think about the entire process
  • Tabulating results
  • Reassigning review teams to submissions
  • Progress tracking
  • Communication
  • Deliberation
  • etc

One stop shopping – a centralized review workspace when reviewing award, grant, and scholarship applications.

• Dedicated review team portals
  • Submission data
  • Online evaluation and feedback
  • Access to supporting documents and files
  • Review team collaboration
• Side effects of a disconnected or offline process
  • Increased time spent on task
  • Inability to track progress
  • Lost data and forgotten reviews
  • Inaccurate results reporting
• Think long term – big picture
  • Additional reviews
  • Reporting
  • Archiving
  • Feedback sharing

Mix and match – combing scores with deliberation when reviewing award, grant, and scholarship applications.

• Why is this important?
  • Do scores tell the full story?
  • Are all evaluations and review teams the same?
  • Scores help power a review team deliberation
• What does this workflow look like?
  • Multi-phase
  • Share data in advance of deliberation meeting
  • Data powered conversations