A fixed-scope engagement that designs the decision layer your platform does not come with: eligibility rules, scoring rubrics, the decision workflow, the portfolio view and the board report. It runs on whatever you already use, from SurveyMonkey Apply and Benevity to Foundant and Fluxx, or on spreadsheets while you grow.
Platforms are good at intake, records and payments. What they assume you already have is the judgment: who qualifies, how proposals are scored, who decides, and what the board sees. That layer is what we design.
| Piece | What it is |
|---|---|
| The decision framework | Eligibility rules and a scoring rubric written from your own priorities, with criteria, weights and a reviewer guide, so two reviewers reading the same proposal reach the same answer. |
| The review and approval workflow | Who screens, who scores, who recommends and who approves, with every judgment call assigned to a named person, drawn as one flow your team and board can follow. |
| The portfolio view | One live view across programs and cycles: stage, amounts, balance by theme and geography, deadlines and reporting due. One look replaces the status meeting. |
| The board reporting pack | A one-page board report your trustees actually read: what was funded, why, how the portfolio is balanced, and what the results say, cycle after cycle. |
| The platform configuration map | How to set up what you already run, SurveyMonkey Apply, Benevity, Foundant, Fluxx or spreadsheets, to carry this system, as a checklist your admin or vendor can act on. |
Founders, trustees and boards of family foundations, corporate giving programs and growing grant-makers, in Canada, the US, the UK, Europe and the GCC, who have a platform or a spreadsheet that collects applications, but no designed way to decide, balance and report.
Rules and checks, written down and testable.
Criteria and weights, with a reviewer guide.
Named approvers at every judgment call.
Balance and stages across programs and cycles.
One page, the same shape every cycle.
Last cycle’s results feed the next one.
Intake forms, applicant portal, submissions, records and payments stay exactly where they are, on SurveyMonkey Apply, Benevity, Foundant, Fluxx, SmartSimple, Blackbaud or spreadsheets. We sell no software and take no commissions. We design on what you run.
How you give today, which platform you use, and what hurts most.
Your priorities become rules, rubrics and workflows, tested against your past applications.
Your board reviews the design. Every judgment call stays with named people.
One pack: framework, workflow, portfolio view, board report and configuration map.
| Stage | AI helps with | People decide |
|---|---|---|
| Intake | Checking applications for completeness, drafting acknowledgments, sorting by program. | What eligibility means, and every borderline case. |
| Review | Summarizing long proposals, flagging missing information, preparing reviewer packs. | Every score, with a reason on record. |
| Decision | Assembling the decision pack: scores, history, portfolio balance in one page. | Who is funded, and for how much. Always. |
| Reporting | Rolling grantee reports into portfolio results, drafting the board summary. | What the results mean, and what changes next cycle. |
The same rubric for every applicant. Every score and decision carries a reason and a name. Applicant and grantee records never leave your systems and are never used to train AI models.
The platforms differ, the sizes differ, the countries differ. The gap is the same: applications are collected, but deciding, balancing and reporting were never designed.
A family foundation in the Gulf gives generously, but informally: requests arrive by WhatsApp, email and introductions, and decisions are made around the family table. The next generation wants structure before the giving grows, without losing the family’s voice.
Eligibility rules that put the family’s values in writing. A simple rubric the family actually uses. A decision flow that keeps elders in charge of awards, run on a clean spreadsheet system until a platform is worth buying.
Every request gets an answer and a reason. The family sees its whole giving on one page for the first time, and the foundation is ready for a platform, and for scale, on its own terms.
A Canadian foundation runs intake on SurveyMonkey Apply. Applications arrive cleanly, but each reviewer scores their own way, committee meetings run long, and borderline cases are decided by whoever argues best on the day.
A scoring rubric with criteria, weights and a reviewer guide, configured into the review stages Apply already has. A decision flow that says who recommends and who approves, with reasons recorded where the applications already live.
Two reviewers reading the same proposal reach the same answer. Committee time goes to the genuinely hard cases, and every applicant can be told why.
A corporate foundation processes hundreds of grants a year through Benevity. The machine runs, but leadership asks a simple question the system cannot answer: what are we funding, where, and what is it achieving?
A portfolio view across programs, regions and themes, built from the platform’s own data. A one-page board report with the same shape every quarter, and a learning loop that feeds results into next year’s giving strategy.
The board sees the whole portfolio in one look. Giving shifts from processing requests to funding a strategy, and the annual report writes itself from the quarterly ones.
A long-standing trust manages its lifecycle on Foundant. Grants go out on time, but grantee reports come back late, in every format, and are filed unread. Trustees approve new grants with no view of what the last ones achieved.
A grantee reporting kit grantees can actually complete, set up in the platform’s existing forms. A roll-up that turns individual reports into portfolio-level results, and a trustee pack that puts last cycle’s results beside this cycle’s decisions.
Reporting stops being a courtesy and starts being evidence. Trustees decide with results in front of them, and grantees spend less time reporting, not more.
Whatever collects your applications today keeps doing it. We design on top.
Rules, rubrics and reasons, so decisions survive any one person’s memory.
One portfolio view and one report shape, cycle after cycle.
Illustrative scenarios, drawn from situations common across the sector. They describe the engagement, not named clients. Platform names belong to their owners; no endorsement is implied.
One-pager and use-case companion, two pages each.
Thirty working days. Fixed fee. Pricing on request.
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