Chapter 17
Preparing for the Review Panel

When you send your original proposal package with the designated number of copies to the sponsor, the sponsor will send the copies to a review panel. The members of the review panel either rank the proposals from best to worst, thereby letting the sponsor's administration decide which ones to fund, or recommend which proposals should be accepted, rejected, or negotiated. The review panels generally rank proposals against established criteria or according to a point system. In this chapter, you learn about how review panels work and what you can do to make it easier for a reviewer to read and evaluate your proposal. You will also learn how to use the reviewers' criteria to improve your proposals and to increase your chances of getting funded.

Learner Outcomes

After completing this chapter, you will be able to

  1. Present your proposal in a form that parallel the reviewer's checklist

  2. Design your proposals to meet review criteria

  3. Understand how the review process works

Key Terms

Internal reviewer—An internal reviewer is a reviewer from the sponsor's staff.

External reviewer—An external reviewer is a reviewer from outside the funding agency.

Review panel—A review panel is a group of reviewers, usually experts in a particular area, brought together to evaluate proposals and make recommendations to the sponsor.

Freedom of Information Act—The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is an act of Congress that enables citizens to receive information about activities that use public funds.

Primary, secondary, and tertiary reviewers—Primary and secondary reviewers read the proposals thoroughly and lead the discussion on them in the review panel. Tertiary reviewers skim the proposals, take notes during the discussion, and summarize the primary and secondary reviewers' comments.

Summary

In this chapter, you learned that there is no universal review process. You were introduced to a number of different review processes used by independent foundations, corporate foundations, nonprofit foundations, and government agencies. By looking at scoring criteria for proposals, you learned what sections of the proposal are weighted more heavily and where you should put your greatest efforts. You also learned how important it is to follow the sponsor's guidelines for formatting, style, number of pages, and ordering the sections of your proposal. Understanding how your proposal will be reviewed and what the reviewers will be looking for will help you write a "reviewer friendly" proposal and increase your chances of receiving funding.

Writing Assignment

  1. To give you the benefit of a mock review panel for your proposal, we suggest that you ask two or three colleagues who were not on your proposal development team to review your proposal against the sponsor's guidelines before you submit it. If your sponsor gives you specific scoring information or questions for reviewers, you can design your own review panel evaluation sheet. If your sponsor's information about reviewing proposals is sketchy, you may use or modify the following generic Review Panel Evaluation Sheet.
  2. It is important that you get another perspective on your proposal so that you can make last minute adjustments and editing changes before submission. It gives you the chance, as Robert Burns so aptly put it: "To see ourselves as others see us." If you ask your peers to review your proposal, they will look for obvious grammar and usage errors, omissions, and lapses in logic. But unless they know what the sponsor will be looking for in your proposal, their review will not be as thorough or as focused as the sponsor's. By using the sponsor's guidelines and review criteria or the generic form we have provided below, you will give your peers useful criteria by which to evaluate the effectiveness of your proposal and they, in turn, will give you a better review.

If you use the Review Panel Evaluation Sheet , we suggest that you ask your mock reviewers to fill out page two first, and then fill out page one of the Review Panel Evaluation Sheet. This process will help them move from specific to general (inductively) in the review.

The Review Panel Evaluation Sheet below may be downloaded for your use.

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