Free tools for awards, scholarship, grant, and competition programs.
Two small calculators for the questions program staff ask before a round opens, and an open invitation to tell me what to build next.
By Ion Despoiu. .
Most of the hard questions in running a program aren’t hard. They are arithmetic that nobody has the hour to sit down and do. Do we have enough judges? Is the spreadsheet still working, or are we just used to it? So I built two free tools that answer those questions in about a minute. They run in your browser. There is no account, and nothing you type is stored or sent.
You can find both on the free tools page. Here is what each one does, and why I built it.
Reviewer capacity calculator
The question it answers: how many reviewers does this round need, and are the ones we have enough?
A review round isn’t 80 applications. It’s volunteer hours. Eighty applications, three reviewers on each, fifteen minutes a read, is 60 hours before a single decision gets made. Grants get heavier quickly. Forty proposals at 45 minutes each, with three reviewers, is already 90 hours.
The reviewer capacity calculator takes the numbers a program chair already knows: expected submissions, reviewers per submission, minutes per review, the reviewers you have, and the length of the review window. It plans against a comfort line of two hours per reviewer per week, and it tells you how many reviewers the round needs.
If you are short, it shows the three ways to close the gap: recruit more reviewers, extend the window, or reduce how many reviewers read each application. Each one is easy to choose before the round opens. None of them is easy to choose three days before the deadline.
Reviewers rarely tell you they’re overloaded. They already said yes. So the reading slides to the last Sunday, the scoring gets rushed, and next year a few of them are suddenly too busy. You don’t lose a weekend. You lose next year’s reviewers. The calculator is there so you see that coming in a planning meeting, not in a quiet decline.
Spreadsheet breaking point
The question it answers: have we outgrown the spreadsheet?
Most programs start on email and a spreadsheet, and for a small program that is often the right call. The trouble is that nobody notices the day it stops being the right call. The hours arrive one chore at a time: chasing a missing transcript, merging attachments into review packets, copying scores into one sheet, stripping names for blind review, matching entry fees to entries.
The spreadsheet breaking point counts those chores. You tell it how your program runs: submissions, judges, reads, rounds, how many programs you run this way, and whether you use blind review, entry fees, or conflict of interest checks. Each chore has a planning number of minutes, visible on the page, so you can see exactly what is being counted and argue with any of it.
Take one of the sample programs: 200 entries, 15 judges, three reads, two rounds. That works out to about 157 staff hours a cycle. At a planning rate of 50 dollars an hour, that is roughly 7,850 dollars a year of staff time spent on the manual parts.
Then it does the part I find most useful. It writes a short summary you can paste into an email to your manager or executive director, in your words, with where the hours go and what that time should be spent on instead. When I led IT at an association, the tools that got approved were the ones with that kind of case behind them: the cost of the tool against the staff time it gives back, and what the team could do with that time.
Two honest notes. First, the break even uses our starting price of 4,000 dollars a year, because that is the number I know. The math works the same for any platform: divide its annual price by your hourly rate, and that is how many staff hours it has to save. Second, sometimes the answer is that the spreadsheet is fine. A small single program with one round often runs well by hand, and the tool will say so.
What the tools have in common
- They run in your browser. No account, no signup, nothing stored or sent.
- The assumptions are on the page. The two-hour comfort line and the minutes per chore are planning judgments, written out so a committee or a board can see the assumption under the number.
- They are built for a decision. Each one ends with something you can act on: a panel size, a shortfall, or a case for your executive director.
- They work for every program type. Awards, scholarships, grants, and competitions all run into the same two constraints: volunteer time and staff time.
What should I build next?
This is the part I would most like your help with.
If there is a question you answer in a spreadsheet every cycle, or one you wish someone would just do the math on, I would like to hear it. It could be about timelines, judging, budgets, sponsors, applicant communication, or anything else that takes more time than it should.
Send it to contact@newempactwork.com with a sentence or two about the program you run. The next tools will come from what people send.
Frequently asked questions
Are the tools really free?
Yes. There is no account, no trial, and no email gate. Open the page and use it.
Is what I type stored?
No. Both tools run in your browser. Nothing is stored or sent.
Can I use them if I’m not looking at New Empact Work?
Yes. The reviewer capacity calculator has nothing to do with any platform. The spreadsheet breaking point uses our starting price for its break even, but the method applies to any platform you are considering.
Which program types do they cover?
Awards, scholarships, grants, and competitions. The reviewer capacity calculator has planning defaults for each, from about 20 minutes for a scholarship essay to 45 for a grant proposal.
How do I suggest a tool?
Email contact@newempactwork.com with the question you want answered and a little about your program.
When the math says it’s time
The tools stop at the decision. New Empact Work is where the program runs once the decision is made: intake, review assignment, reminders, scoring, and a record of who reviewed what, for awards, scholarships, grants, and competitions. If your numbers say it’s time, request a demo.
Most platforms start the conversation with a demo. I’d rather start it with your numbers.