The quality of the review process makes or breaks a strong grant-making foundation. When a foundation has a poor or unrefined review process, it can lead to a foundation’s grants being allocated incorrectly relative to its strategy. This can lead to frustrated grantees and a foundation that has compliance issues that are easily preventable when a foundation has a well-organized review process.
This resource will walk you through why grant review is important, what a perfect grant review process would look like, how to standardize the variables, and how to make grant review efficient without sacrificing quality. Afterward, it will cover grant review reporting and visualization, and end with how Fluxx can make grant review easier for foundations.
Why Your Grant Application Review Process Is Important
The review of grant applications is where strategy meets action. It is the critical point in your process where your foundation implements your mission-driven priorities in funding decisions, where the needs of governance, equity, and record-keeping converge.
A good design of a review process will ensure consistency in your foundation’s decisions across programs and reviewers and over several cycles. This is because a good design will eliminate biases in decisions by making them clear and straightforward and will also ensure that applicants are treated fairly by setting their expectations right.
A good design will also enhance accountability because decisions can be traced back to a defined scoring and approved workflows.
If review is not optimized, it leads to a series of problems that build on each other: staff are busy tracking reviewers, committee members are working to different standards, applications are bottlenecked at handoffs, and reasoning about a decision is fragmented among emails. The end result: longer cycles to get grants out, poorer data, and higher audit or governance review risk.
The Ideal Grant Application Review Process
"The best peer review is consistent, repeatable, and scaled to the size of your portfolio," writes Scott Yovim, a program manager at Microsoft, on the Microsoft Azure blog. "It provides clear gates, ownership at every step, and every application is evaluated against the same set of criteria."
A common review process in an optimized review system may consist of
- Intake and Validation: The applications are submitted via structured forms that have mandatory fields, budgets, and the ability to upload documents. The basic completeness checks occur automatically so that the staff members are not left screening missing files.
- Screening for eligibility: Employees verify alignment with the mission, geographic or population needs, 501(c)(3) status, and ineligibilities. Ineligible applications go to the decline process.
- Programmatic Review: The fit, feasibility, and potential for impact are reviewed by the program staff or the reviewers for the subject matter. This phase involves structured notes and preliminary assessments based on your set criteria.
- Due Diligence: This involves the assessment of risk and readiness. This could be the assessment of the financial health of the organization or its performance record. This may also involve the assessment of its compliance record and the need for certain policies. For high-risk awards, there may be a need for more detailed documentation
- Panel or committee scoring: Scoring is done using a common rubric by committee or panel members. Scores are aggregated to provide a summary to highlight strong applicants and those that stand out or require further discussion.
- Decision and approval routing: Recommendations follow the appropriate approval route, whether this be program management, finance sign-off, executive approval, or board approval, based on the size of the award.
- Award documentation and notification: Award conditions, reporting obligations, and payment arrangements are presented identically. Notifications are presented to the applicant with definitive results.
This design achieves speed without having to give up rigor because every step in this design has a point and every handoff in this design is defined.
Key Variables
The key to better reviews is to create consistency for the reviewers. Your foundation does not have to have dozens of criteria, but it does have to have consistent criteria.
The variables that foundations should define and score include:
- Alignment of mission: How well the request is aligned with your mission objectives.
- Impact potential refers to the potential for the project to deliver a desired outcome and benefit whom and how success will be measured.
- Feasibility: "The ability of a project to be completed given the plan, schedule, resources, and
- Budget clarity: Whether a budget is comprehensive, realistic, and consistent with a plan.
- Organizational capacity: The candidate's ability to lead, build systems, and deliver on what is being asked of them.
- Risk Profile: Financial Soundness, Compliance Readiness, Reputation Factors, and Delivery Risk.
- Equity and access: In what ways the request benefits communities, removes barriers, or closes disparities, if equity is a foundation priority.
The trick is to do more than simply identify the variables, but to specify in reviewer terms what “high,” “medium,” and “low” mean.
Compliance Factors
Even when it comes to private philanthropy, there are implications regarding compliance when it comes to the review process. This means that your workflow should document your decision, address conflicts, and fulfill all requirements before proceeding to disburse funds.
Review stage safeguards which are often needed by foundations would include:
- Conflict of interest management ensures that reviewers can disclose, recuse themselves from, and document exclusion from reviews.
- Records of decisions, scores, comments, and recommendations and decisions on approval.
- This includes role-based access in order to ensure that sensitive applicant information can only be viewed by authorized personnel.
- Due diligence obligations based on the size of the award, risk of the program, or regulatory exposure.
- Audit ready history for who viewed it, who approved it, and changes made.
Compliance is made more manageable as it is incorporated into the process and not treated as an afterthought once the award is already in motion.
Compliance is made more manageable as it is incorporated into the process and
Keeping It Simple
The point of optimization is not to be complicated; it is to be clear. It is possible to be rigorous in a review process and be simple at the same time.
To simplify your process and simultaneously increase quality:
- Use a small set of criteria that map directly to strategy.
- Restrict the amount of free-form evaluation and utilize the fields provided for scoring and narrative.
- Streamline the reviewer’s work by giving clear rubrics and guidance, not long PDFs.
- Stage gates to ensure that applications do not proceed to the next stage until required items have been completed.
- Communications need to be standardized to ensure consistency in the language used to direct the applicant and
Simplicity safeguards speed, and speed safeguards your team’s capacity.
Reporting and Visualizations
Optimized reviews are more than decision-making; they are all about visibility. Reporting and dashboard capabilities allow foundations to see what’s happening for cycles, reviewers, and programs, which assists leadership in decision-making.
Useful review reporting would include:
- Pipeline views: counts by stage, time in stage, and decision deadlines coming up.
- Distributions of scores by program, by reviewer, or by cycle can identify discrepancies and areas for calibration.
- Funding overviews by priority area, geography, or population served.
- Tracking reviewer workload in order to ensure a balanced panel and realistic deadlines.
- Cycle time measures such as average time to decision, denial reasons, and rework rates.
Including reporting as a component of the review process enables your foundation to fine-tune criteria and develop resource plans for the next review cycle based on the reporting that is incorporated as a component of the review process.
Streamline Your Review Process with Fluxx
Fluxx assists foundations in organizing the process of reviewing grants by allowing them to centrally intake, route, and score grants. Rather than trying to piece together information from spreadsheets, emails, and disjointed feedback, all of this information is consolidated into one system with defined stages of progress.
Fluxx allows flexible review processes that correspond to the actual way your foundation functions. This can be internal program reviews, external reviews, panel reviews, or even board approvals. Scoring reviews against a rubric and sharing reviews and recommendations to move forward an application are possible. This also allows reminders to prevent reviews being done late. There is also real-time visibility of the pipeline and scoring.
In doing so, Fluxx allows foundations to streamline review, compliance, decision-making, and reporting in one solution, making the process less frictional while increasing transparency.
Making Reviews Faster, Fairer, and More Defensible
An optimized grant review process leads to improved results for all parties. Your team focuses less on logistics and more on assessing impact. Applicants receive a more understandable and predictable experience. Your leadership feels greater confidence in the consistency and alignment of decisions.
If your foundation is ready to transform review, minimize cycle times, or improve accountability, Fluxx may assist you in creating a review system that scales. To learn how Fluxx supports intake, scoring, approval, or reporting within a single system, schedule a demo today.
