Turning reviews on for an award adds judging to that award. Staff can score and decide on applications in rounds, using the review space Rhythm creates for the award. This article explains what changes after you turn reviews on, where to find review setup items, and how to open custom field administration for reviews.
Turning Reviews On
Reviews is a switch on the award, alongside the award’s other feature switches. You’ll find the reviews option in the award’s settings. Availability varies by account, so if you do not see it, reviews may already be set up differently for your account. Contact Support to confirm.
Prerequisites
The award must already exist, and applications must be enabled on it, before the review setup items in this article appear.
What Changes Once Reviews Are On
Turning reviews on for an award automatically makes two changes:
- Rhythm creates one review space for the award, giving staff and reviewers a place to work. That space appears in the Portal as soon as Rhythm creates it.
- A Reviews menu item appears in the award’s menu. When reviews are off, this item is hidden; when you turn reviews on, it appears.
Reviewers open their assigned reviews from the reviews overview page in that space, not from a page inside the Console. Send reviewer-facing links to that page. This matters most for reviewers who are not staff and have no Console access, such as scholarship judges. Point them to the portal-facing reviews page instead of trying to get them into the Console.
Finding Review Setup Items
Review setup items are the pages where you configure review processes and rounds. You find them under Applications in the award’s setup menu. These items follow the award’s applications switch, not its reviews switch, so they appear whenever applications are enabled for the award, even if reviews are not turned on.
A checklist for application reviews also appears on the award’s setup overview page. This checklist appears for every award, whether or not that award has reviews turned on.
Tip
If you expect to see review setup items but do not, check whether applications are enabled for the award. That switch controls the review setup items, not the Reviews switch itself.
Review form fields, such as an overall recommendation and scoring fields for that award’s applications, are configured within the specific award. They are not managed in the overall Awards settings. If you cannot find them, make sure you are in the award’s own setup, not the account-wide Awards setup.
Warning
Review setup, and the review workflow it configures, applies only to award applications. Award nominations do not have an equivalent review workflow. You cannot route a nomination through reviews, and settings for award applications do not have a matching place to configure the same flow for nominations. Review buckets and bucket assignment rules apply only to award applications too. The fields available for a Bucket Assignment Rule are custom fields on the application, not fields from a nomination form. If your program needs judging at both a nomination-like stage and an application stage, set up two application processes instead, with one labeled for each stage, so both can go through reviews.
Set Up Review Teams and Rounds Before Reviewers Can Access Anything
Before a reviewer can access anything, an administrator must set up review teams and review rounds. Create a review team, add its members, and assign each member a role: Reviewer, Administrator, or both. Then create at least one review round, set its status, and assign review teams to review buckets. Once a round’s status is Open, its reviewers can access and submit their reviews.
Review rounds can require a configurable minimum number of reviewers per submission. Look for this setting in Review Rounds. You delete a review round you no longer need from the review rounds page, using its trash-can control. If you are trying to simplify your review structure, remove the extra rounds instead of trying to delete a bucket first.
Round progression is not automatic. A submission does not move from one round to the next just because every review in the prior round is complete. An administrator advances it, either one submission at a time from the portal using the review update action, or in bulk with a query or mass update. There is currently no way to move a submission between rounds directly from the console application record view.
Tip
If one application needs review from more than one position or team, you can use a later round for the second pass. Let the application go through one bucket in the first round, then use a bucket assignment rule to route it into a specific bucket in the second round. Because you assign review teams per bucket in Review Rounds setup, this lets a different team review the same application in sequence.
Warning
Adding a new starting round does not retroactively move existing submissions. Only submissions created after you add the new round start in it automatically. Submissions that were already created or processed under the earlier setup stay where they are, and you need to move them yourself, for example with a bulk update. The help text near bucket assignment explains how bucket assignment rules route submissions going forward. It does not mean existing submissions will be reassigned into a newly added round.
If review assignments look uneven across a bucket, check your review rounds before assuming round-robin assignment is broken. A misconfigured round is a more likely cause of uneven distribution than a defect in the assignment itself. Round-robin assignment is not built to give each reviewer a specific target number of submissions. It distributes submissions in turn, not to a count you set.
After you change bucket rules or other review settings, reprocess bucket assignments so the change applies to submissions already in Rhythm. Go to Setup › Applications › Review Maintenance and run Reprocess Bucket Assignments. To move applications into a bucket more directly, you can add Bucket Assignment Rules under Review Settings, save, and then run Reprocess Bucket Assignments to apply them. You can also create a new review bucket and use mass update to move a specific set of applications into it. Test the process on one application first before applying a broader change.
Warning
Review buckets and rounds have a few restrictions worth planning around. An application can only belong to one review bucket at a time. If your bucket assignment rules would place an application into two buckets at once, Rhythm puts it in the default bucket instead. Changing an application’s bucket by hand, or through a mass update, only sticks if the application’s override-bucket setting is also turned on. Otherwise, Rhythm’s normal bucket-assignment sync moves it back to wherever its rules say it belongs. If you are reassigning buckets in bulk, update the override-bucket field before the bucket field itself, or the reassignment may not take effect. Moving an application between rounds manually does not participate in round-robin assignment. That automation only applies to the bucket and round Rhythm assigns on its own. If you need multi-stage routing that rounds do not give you directly, some accounts keep every bucket in a single round, use bucket names to label the intended stages, and rely on bucket assignment rules together with Maintenance › Reprocess Bucket Assignments to move applications between those buckets instead.
Review Custom Fields
Reviews support the same custom fields as any other Rhythm record. The Awards Console does not include a menu link to review custom field administration, so manage those fields the same way you manage custom fields for any other object. See Custom Fields for how custom fields work generally, then look for Reviews among your account’s custom objects.
There currently is not a way to customize the Review 360 layout itself. You cannot rearrange it to show score, recommendation, and review custom fields together in a layout of your own choosing, because the layout is fixed.
Warning
You can include review custom fields in a Reviews query in the Submissions & Reviews app. That same querying is not available for reviews inside Awards & Nominations. If you need to report on review field values, expect to do that from Submissions & Reviews rather than from an Awards query.
If you are building queries or reports around review rounds, remember that a review references its round. The round’s own details, including its name, status, display order, and dates, live on a separate review-round record. Bring that record into your reporting alongside reviews if you need to group or label results by round.
Review Forms
A review form is what a reviewer fills out for each submission: an overall recommendation, a score, and any review custom fields you have added. This is where judging actually happens. Without a review form, a reviewer has nowhere to record a decision.
Review forms are configured in Awards & Nominations under Setup › Applications › Review Forms, where you edit a form and add the custom fields you want on it. A field you add applies to the review form as a whole, so you do not need to add it again for each section of the form. The award itself must be assigned a review form under Setup › Applications › Review Settings › Review Form, and you can override that form for a specific round in Review Rounds settings if a later round needs different fields.
Warning
There is currently no way to assign a different review form to a specific review bucket. The review form you choose in Review Settings applies to every bucket on the award.
A Review step’s final action can display the generic label “Save Changes” instead of “Submit,” even when the step is meant to be a final submission. If you want it to read “Submit,” override the transition’s button label manually. Separately, a workflow’s submit transition can sometimes still show a default “Save” label instead of “Submit” after you configure it as the submit step. If that happens, overriding the label yourself is the immediate workaround.
Permissions
Adding or changing custom fields on reviews requires the review administrator permission for custom fields, which is separate from other Awards permissions.
Assigning and Replacing Reviewers
Administrators often need to know how reviewer assignments map to submissions, where to see or change those assignments, and what a reviewer sees once assigned. Reviewer assignment happens at the bucket level. You do not assign one specific review directly to one specific reviewer. Instead, you assign a review team to a bucket, and reviewer access to a submission follows that bucket-and-team configuration. You can see and manage a single application’s reviewer from that application’s Reviews tab in the application 360.
Tip
Depending on your account, manual reviewer assignment for award reviews may be available directly in Awards & Nominations, or it may require the Submissions & Reviews application. If you do not see a manual assignment option in Awards, check whether Submissions & Reviews is part of your account before assuming assignment is not supported.
To manually distribute reviews across specific reviewers instead of relying on automatic assignment, change a bucket’s assignment method to manual on the round. Unassigned reviews then appear on the reviews dashboard, where you assign them to reviewers yourself.
Warning
Replacing a reviewer does not automatically transfer their existing assignments. If you delete a reviewer and add a different one, the new reviewer is not assigned to anything the old reviewer was already assigned to. You have to assign the new reviewer to each application or submission yourself. Add the new reviewer first and confirm the assignment before you delete the old one. If you delete first, you may not be able to assign the replacement to that item. If you are reassigning manually and see an error that the reviewer ID is incorrect, that can happen during reviewer replacement. Recheck that you are assigning the new reviewer’s own record, not a stale reference to the reviewer you removed.
A submission can lose its Reviews tab entirely when it has no reviewer assigned, such as right after you delete its only reviewer. Assigning a reviewer again restores the tab and review access for that submission. Similarly, if the only reviewer shown on a submission has a delete option next to their name, and bucket settings do not clearly explain the assignment, the reviewer was often assigned manually instead of through the bucket’s own team configuration.
Changing an application’s review bucket or team from the review admin interface updates what that interface shows. It does not always move reviewer-facing visibility to match right away. A reviewer can still see the application under its original team or bucket until you reprocess bucket assignments. See Set Up Review Teams and Rounds Before Reviewers Can Access Anything. The Console’s application edit screen does not expose bucket or team reassignment directly, so use the review admin interface and reprocess afterward.
Tip
If you add a committee as a reviewer team, the roster it pulls in can include everyone who has ever served on that committee, not only its current members. Review the list before relying on it to reflect who is active today.
Reviewer decline reasons are the reasons a reviewer gives when declining an assigned review. You configure them under Submissions setup, not inside Awards. If your account does not have the Submissions & Reviews application, you cannot configure decline reasons, and without them the Awards setting that lets reviewers decline reviews cannot be saved.
Controlling What Reviewers See
What a reviewer sees of an application is controlled by a review page layout, not automatically by the application’s own custom fields. Create the layout in Awards & Nominations setup, choose which fields are visible to reviewers on it, then assign that layout in the specific award’s Application Review Settings for reviewers.
Warning
Adding a custom field to an award application does not make it visible to judges on its own. Go to Setup › Applications › Page Layouts, edit the relevant layout, and add a Field Group component with the fields judges should see, or build a separate layout for that purpose.
The reviewer’s View Submission area uses that same layout. If the layout is blank or missing components, reviewers see a message that there are no custom field values to display, even though the application has values. They may also see only review metadata, such as bucket or round information, instead of the application’s own fields. To fix this, add the components or field groups you want to that layout. Do not look for a separate setting. Reviewers see only the custom fields you have placed on the configured layout. A field that is not on it does not appear to reviewers, even if it is filled in on the application.
Membership status and membership type do not carry over automatically from a member’s record into a review. If reviewers need to see that information, add a custom field to the award application for the applicant to enter it themselves. There is currently no automatic way to bring it in from the membership record.
Whether the applicant’s name is visible to a reviewer in review rounds follows the round’s blind review setting. The name appears when blind review is not turned on for that round, with no separate field needed to show it.
Blind Review
Blind review is meant to hide information that could identify the applicant from reviewers. Beyond contact details, this includes the applicant’s name. Reviewers should not see it anywhere in their review experience, including as the application’s title in a reviewer’s portal review list, and it should not appear through the Review Submission component either. If you turn on blind review for a round and still see an applicant’s name in either place, treat that as unexpected and contact Support instead of assuming blind review is working as intended.
Troubleshooting Reviews
A reviewer's review form loads blank when they sign in directly to the Portal, but works fine when you impersonate them from the Console. This pattern has previously been a product defect, not a reviewer-setup problem. If a reviewer reports a blank form only when they sign in on their own, do not assume their permissions or the review form configuration are the issue. Contact Support with the details.
An assigned review doesn't load in the Portal at all. This can mean the underlying submission or review space needs to be repopulated. Contact Support, who can run the maintenance task that repopulates it.
Closing a review round, or hiding an award from the Portal, doesn't remove it from the reviewer-facing Review Center. To take an award program out of the Review Center, close its related space in the Submissions & Reviews app. Portal visibility settings and a closed round are not enough on their own.
Finding Reviewers Who Haven't Submitted
There is no built-in reminder email for reviewers who have not submitted their assigned reviews yet. Awards & Nominations queries cannot return a list of reviewers or review teams. In Submissions & Reviews, you can only query a reviewer who has already submitted at least one review, so a reviewer who has not started yet will not appear in either query. The review export also does not include reviewer contact details. If you need to identify and reach reviewers who are behind, build the best list you can from whatever review-assignment records your account lets you query. Then send the reminder yourself through your usual email tool instead of expecting Rhythm to send it for you.
Duplicate Review Scores
Saving a review and returning to finish it later, using Save & Return Later, has been known to create duplicate scores, which can block the review from being submitted. If this happens, disabling the review form’s Save & Return Later option is a temporary way to stop additional duplicates from being created. It only prevents new duplicates; it does not fix a review that is already affected. An engineering fix addressed the underlying cause, but that fix was not retroactive. A review that already showed duplicate scores before the fix can still need manual correction. Edit the score directly in the reviewer’s Review 360 to correct it.