by Lindsay Nash | Aug 4, 2026 | Article
Anyone evaluating grants management software will have come across the standard feature rundown for grant evaluation: review modes, scoring criteria, panel assignments. But there are important details those feature lists rarely illustrate: what does any of this actually look like for the person doing the reviewing?
It’s a question worth exploring early. Reviewers are often subject matter experts or busy professionals giving up hours they don’t have much spare of, and a grant review process that’s slow or hard to follow can cause friction and, worse, risks reviewers disengaging, rushing their assessments or dropping out partway through a program.
Below, we’ve mapped out exactly what a reviewer encounters in Good Grants, from being assigned their first application through to submitting a final score.
Before a reviewer opens a single application, the grant manager has already made a decision about how that reviewer gets connected to their workload, either by adding reviewers individually, importing a larger review panel in bulk, sending reviewers an invitation to participate, or, for programs with public voting, enabling reviewer self-registration.
Watch: How to add reviewers in Good Grants
Regardless of which route is used, what the reviewer experiences is consistent: they log into their own account and arrive in the Review workspace, where the only applications visible are the ones assigned to them. Nothing else in the program—other reviewers’ work, other rounds, admin settings—appears in their view. It’s a deliberately narrow, uncluttered starting point.
Once logged in, the reviewer lands on a confidentiality agreement. This is an optional yet popular option for those looking to add built-in integrity to the judging process. You can customise the text here to fit your program needs exactly.
On login, a reviewer’s assigned applications are waiting for them in the Review workspace, effectively their control centre for the assessment period. Applications are organised by round, panel or score set, depending on how the program has been set up.
This view answers a practical question straight away: how many applications is this reviewer responsible for, and how far through the list are they? This matters, because a busy reviewer trying to fit review work around a full schedule needs to know upfront whether they’re facing 10 applications or 100.
Selecting an application from the workspace brings the reviewer into the assessment itself: the applicant’s written answers, attachments and any supporting documents, displayed in a layout built for evaluation rather than editing. A well-built application form makes a real difference at this stage: a clearly structured, well-tested submission is much quicker to work through than one built without the reviewer’s experience in mind.
Depending on how the score set is configured, assessing an application might mean applying numeric scores against defined criteria under Good Grants’ Scoring mode, or working through a different combination of quantitative and qualitative review, since programs aren’t limited to a single method and can combine several across different rounds.
Reviewers can generally add comments alongside their scores too, which is helpful for their own notes, and, depending on settings, visible to fellow reviewers or, later, shared with the applicant as feedback.
Few reviewers get through a full assignment list in a single sitting, so scores and comments save automatically as they go, meaning a reviewer can step away and pick up an unfinished application without losing their place.
Guidance sits alongside the application as well, including scoring criteria and context that you can set up beforehand to help clarify what a strong application looks like for that round. This is the kind of upfront configuration that supports a fair, well-run review process, and that way, reviewers don’t have to guess at expectations or track down a separate set of instructions to understand what they’re being asked to judge.
Once an application has been scored, the reviewer moves on to the next one in their list, working at whatever pace suits them. All the while, the Review workspace keeps a running tally of what’s done and what remains, so a reviewer always has a clear read on where they stand — no need for a personal tracking spreadsheet on the side.
Once a reviewer has made their way through every assigned application, their scores are submitted and the round progresses. At that point, responsibility shifts to the grant manager, who can compare applications against each other on the leaderboard and move applications forward into subsequent rounds where relevant.
Applicants can also receive the reviewer’s scores and comments back as feedback once the review is complete, a small addition with real impact, giving applicants insight into how their work was assessed and where they might improve next time, regardless of the outcome.
So why does any of this matter when you’re choosing a platform? A review process that’s confusing or clunky puts grant managers and reviewers in a difficult spot. It’s a completely reasonable question to raise when comparing grants management platforms: what are we actually asking our reviewers to do, day to day?
Good Grants is designed to keep the reviewing process simple, with a secure, straightforward login, clearly assigned work, guidance available exactly where it’s needed and a scoring process reviewers can fit around their own schedules.
As one software reviewer wrote on G2: “…Good Grants makes reviewing much easier for our grant panelists, compared to using a spreadsheet like we were before. Everything is in one place and our grant panelists have commented on how easy the platform was to use.”
When comparing vendors, it’s worth asking to see this directly: not a features slide, but the actual screens a reviewer would be working from.
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