When it comes to distributing awards, grantmakers face a fundamental challenge. In order to do the most good, all applications must be carefully and objectively reviewed. But to meet urgent community needs and distribute funding fast, this review must happen quickly.
Many funders, from governments to foundations to corporations, typically receive thousands, or even tens of thousands of applications. They’re faced with balancing the need for an accurate and fair review of every application with the importance of speed—and often, with limited staff.
Thankfully, there is a solution that can help. As humans, we depend on technology powered by artificial intelligence for all kinds of day-to-day tasks. From online shopping to fighting disinformation to regulating traffic, technology and AI improve the quality of the human experience.
Submittable’s Automated Review applies the same principle to your review process. A custom feature Submittable offers to fit the needs of your team, Automated Review enables the review of vast amounts of data at speeds incomparable to assessment done by humans, while also reducing fraud and the risk of misappropriated funds.
Think of it like the Priority Inbox for Gmail: before, all personal emails, automated notifications, and promotional emails left you with an overwhelming volume of messages to manually sift through, some relevant and some not. The Priority Inbox naturally focuses your attention on the content most likely to be important to you.
Here’s how Submittable’s Automated Review can help your organization make decisions faster and with greater accuracy, leading to improved outcomes for all.
What Automated Review can achieve
Automated Review takes much of the manual labor out of the review process so you can focus on what’s most important. Specifically, it can:
- Extract data from files, such as tax forms or identification documents
- Correlate data—as an example, by scanning vast third party databases such as online reviews or social media profiles
- Validate information, including the ability to verify identities through review of video recordings
- Analyze applications, such as essay questions and media
- Perform calculations and automate complex, multi-stage workflows
- Apply automated scoring based on custom-defined business logic
How Automated Review will help you and your team
Automated Review offers a host of benefits to organizations running robust processes and receiving thousands of applications. It helps your organization:
- Review a huge volume of applications, quickly. For teams anticipating thousands of applications or more, the time demand on personnel to review can be impossible to meet. Outsourcing this labor to technology makes it possible to run these robust programs more quickly.
- Automate a complex review process. From performing calculations, to applying scores, to movement between stages, automate complex processes across a huge volume of applications.
- Reduce fraud and human error. Technology is not subject to natural human error—it doesn’t get tired, and it’s more accurate. Its ability to cross reference vastly more data than a person could also means it can catch fraud with considerably heightened accuracy.
- Avoid misappropriation of funds. It’s unfortunate but true: grantmakers must protect themselves against potentially fraudulent applications. Automated Review can help you avoid the messy and often irreversible misappropriation of funds by catching trouble early on.
- Built-in manual spot checks for peace of mind. Your custom solution can incorporate redundancies, such as holding a set percentage of applications for a manual spot check, so you can move forward confidently.
- Maximize impact with better decisions. By applying automated scoring based on custom-defined rubric criteria, your best applications will naturally filter to the top—leading to better decisions in record time. It all helps enhance your overall impact.
Learn more about Automated Review
Automated Review is a custom, premium feature coordinated by our sales team. Contact us today to learn more about whether Automated Review is a good fit for your process.
Also new from Submittable
With Submittable’s new Funds Distribution capabilities, you can take the headache out of disbursing awards. Through our partnerships with global and domestic financial partners, you can get payments to awardees quickly and securely, with the click of a button (and in as little as 48 hours). Learn more.
Learn more about Submittable
Submittable is a social impact platform helping governments, corporations, and foundations run social impact programs. Watch a demo to see how Submittable can help your organization start making a difference, fast.
Natalya is the director of product marketing at Submittable and is focused on helping organizations get a ton of value out of the platform. She is a bookworm, adventure enthusiast and card-carrying cat lady as well as a writer and yogi.