Review and score a grant proposal using the Reviewer Service Portal

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 1 minute to read
  • As a Merit Reviewer, you can review grant proposals for feasibility, impact, and alignment with the grant program's goals. Reviewers can then score proposals as part of the evaluation stage of the Public Sector Digital Services Grants Management using the Reviewer Service portal.

    Before you begin

    Role required: external_reviewer

    About this task

    Reviewers can then score proposals as part of the evaluation stage of the Public Sector Digital Services Grants Management using the Reviewer Service portal.

    You can either select Submit or Decline Review for a particular Merit Review Task. When you click Submit, a modal will appear where you can confirm by clicking Submit again, and the state will automatically change from “In Progress” to “Complete”.

    When you select Decline Review, a modal pops up where you can decline specific MRTs by providing a valid reason, such as a conflict of interest or other concerns. The state then changes to Declined, and the view returns to the default scoring screen with no scores.

    Procedure

    1. Log in to the Reviewer Service Portal.
      All review tasks appear under My review tasks along with the state of the task, score, and the last updated date.
      • To view your review tasks, navigate to My work > My reviews.
      • To view review tasks for a specific grant program that you are participating in, navigate to My work > My grant programs.
    2. Select a review expand the categories under the Scoring tab.
      Scoring is the default tab that appears. Select other tabs to view information about the grant proposal.

      scoring tab view

    3. Select a score from the drop-down and provide comments for rationale, strengths, and concerns for each of the categories and select Save.
      For more information about the scoring rubric, select the KB article listed under Rubric.
    4. Select Submit to complete the review or select Decline review and provide a reason.
      The evaluation is successfully complete and the status of the review task is updated to Complete, along with the score, triggering a notification to the grants program manager.

    Result

    The proposal is now routed to the grants program manager for further evaluation, and they are able to approve or decline the proposal.