Decision making 2026
A process to reach your funding decisions
Use the links on this page to help you work through the various stages including the forms you’ll need to complete and the information you’ll need to access.
Proposal stages
The documents are in the portal here
Community Voice assessment form
Just Futures assessment form
Environment assessment form
We are currently: Reading and Assessing
This is the stage where you work alone, reading the proposals and filling in your assessment forms. These should be your own thoughts and opinions, we’ll compare notes and discuss them together in the next stage. Remember, you can read them here at EFI on specific days or at a time and place that suits you better.
We have allowed for three days between 19th - 31st January (for Just Futures) and between 19th - 28th January (for Community Voice and Environment) to complete this stage.
You are likely to need several tabs open on your browser - access to these is described below:
the proposal documents
the Assessment form
the proposal template that organisations have worked from
Finding your project documents
You will receive an email from Foundation Scotland with details for logging into the Proposal portal.
Once you have sorted out a password you can find your documents as follows.
Go to the Foundation Scotland Website and login using the button (top right)
2. Choose the Donor and Panel Icon…
3. … then Panel Portal
4. You should now be able to navigate your way to a page called Meetings - you might have to click on ‘panel’ first.
The Meetings page should be the theme or cluster you are a member of.
5. Click on the name your Meeting.
The proposals will be in the tab called Funding Requests
Click select next to the proposal you want to view.
Click download next to the document you want to open. It should open in your browser.
Finding the assessment forms
The assessment form is an online form. Each group has their own form which can be used for each assessment - make sure that you add the correct Project Code (eg JF-2 or CV-3 or E-1) to ensure your comments are matched with the correct proposal.
Community Voice assessment forms
Just Futures assessment forms
Environment assessment forms
How to assess a proposal
For each proposal you will have three documents to consider - the written document (template is here), the budget (template is here) and the Three Horizons map (which could be submitted in any format).
You should read and review the proposal on your own, adding comments and scores to the assessment form independently. These are not final scores, and you will have a chance to talk about your scores in the cluster discussions. We can have printed versions of the scoring guide for each proposal or support you to make this process easier.
Those who have taken part in similar exercises have recommended reading a few proposals before you begin to add scores to the assessment forms.
Key dates
Everyone will approach assessment in different ways but here are some things to consider:
you will have 10 or 11 proposals to consider - those who have done it before have recommended reading a few before you start to ‘score’ the first one you read.
you might find it easer to remind yourself of the questions on the assessment form before you read the proposal.
Proposal documents will be available to read from Monday 19th January.
Deadline for Just Futures group to submit their assessments is (last resort - 12:00 noon on Friday 30th January).
Deadline for Community Voice and Environment groups to submit their assessments is 12:00 noon on Tuesday 28th January.