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Before a single application lands, decide what you'll fund and how you'll judge it. The rubric and eligibility rules you set here are the standard every submission is read against on arrival — write them well and the whole round scores itself consistently.
Before a single application lands, decide two things: what you will fund, and how you will judge it. The rubric and eligibility rules you write in this chapter are the standard every submission is read against the moment it arrives. Get them concrete and the whole round scores itself the same way, whoever is reviewing; leave them vague and every reviewer quietly invents their own bar — which is exactly how two similar applications get two different verdicts.
Key takeaways
In a portal-first process the rubric is an afterthought — a scoring sheet reviewers open once applications are already in, interpreting the criteria however they read them that day. That's where inconsistency enters: the standard lives in people's heads, not on the page. Writing the rubric first inverts it. The criteria become the thing the system reads every application against on arrival, so scoring is a lookup against a shared standard rather than a fresh judgment each time.
It also front-loads the hard question funders eventually ask: what are we actually trying to fund? Answer it once, in writing, and every downstream step — screening, scoring, even the grantee reporting you'll design later — inherits the same definition.
List the criteria
Name the three to five things that, if true of an application, would make you confident. These are your scoring criteria — not everything you could ask, only what actually moves a decision.
Weight them and define the evidence
Give each criterion a weight, then write what evidence in the application would earn a high, middle, or low score. Describe what you'd point to — a named partner, a baseline figure, a realistic budget — not an adjective like “strong.”
Set the eligibility gates
Separate the non-negotiables — geography, org type, budget ceiling, deadline — as hard pass/fail rules that screen before scoring. An ineligible application never competes on quality; it's filtered, with the reason cited.
Keep the two kinds of rule apart, because they do different jobs. Hard eligibility is binary and unarguable: you either serve the named county or you don't. Soft criteria are matters of degree, scored and weighted. Mixing them — turning “we prefer local organizations” into a hard gate, or a real deadline into a soft preference — is where rounds get unfair and slow. Name each rule as one or the other before intake opens.
Think it through for your own round
How would you approach this?
Don't reach for a template — answer these for what you actually fund:
For example: a youth-employment fund wrote “We fund programs that place 16–24-year-olds into jobs lasting six months,” then made age and geography hard gates and job durability its top-weighted criterion.
Answer those three in writing and you don't just have a scoring sheet — you have the standard the rest of the course builds on. The next chapter turns it into intake that scores every application the moment it lands.
Frequently asked questions
Eligibility is pass/fail — hard rules that screen an application out before it competes. Scoring is a matter of degree — weighted criteria applied to the applications that pass.
Three to five that actually move a decision. More than that and reviewers stop weighing them; fewer and you're not really discriminating between applications.
“Strong partnership” means something different to every reviewer. “A named partner with a signed MOU” is checkable — so scores are repeatable and can be cited to the application.
Yes — and everything already submitted is re-read against the new version, so you're never locked into a first draft. That's the point of scoring on a shared standard rather than in reviewers' heads.
Yes — any process that reviews inbound submissions against a bar. The rubric-first approach is identical; only the criteria change.
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