The Reviewer Application Approval feature allows you to accept reviewers who will help you evaluate session proposals. If you have a lot of session proposals, this feature will help you stay organized by assigning people to review the sessions. Once reviewed, you can take a look at their ratings and comments to decide whether a proposal will be denied or approved. This guide will walk you through how to enable the application process and set up a review workflow, making it easy for reviewers to evaluate the proposed sessions.

Once the reviewer application approval feature is enabled, an "Apply as Reviewer" section will appear on the event’s landing page. When they click the "Apply" button, they will be asked to enter their information.

You will receive the request in the admin console, wherein you can accept or reject it as a reviewer. When you approve them as a reviewer, you can start assigning sessions to them.

After a session is assigned, they will receive an email on how to access the "Review Portal," where they can evaluate the session proposals you assign to them.

When reviewers send in their evaluations, you can assess whether the session should be part of your event or not, based on the reviewer's feedback.

After enabling it, you should see the Reviewer section on the landing page's right side of the About tab.

You can customize the label, description, and button text of the Reviewers section on the landing page.

In the Submissions menu, go to Submission Form under Reviewers to add and customize the questions to be asked depending on the information you need from them.

After submitting their application, they will get an email confirming that their request has been received. Whenever you change the status of their application to approved, denied, or waitlisted, they will get another email to let them know about the change.

You can edit the subject and body of these emails, and disable the automatic sending if you don't want them to receive the emails in the Post Registration Emails section in Reviewers > Settings tab.

You can add an introductory page that applicants will see before they enter all the information. You can customize the banner image, title, and description on that page. This will be the page the applicants see when they click the button from the landing. You can enable this in Reviewers > Settings > Enable Introductory Page

After reviewers are approved, they are assigned which sessions they need to review and given access to the Reviewer Portal, where they can rate sessions based on the review form questions you create. In this step, you'll learn how to customize the questions, set up review processes based on conditions you create, and other review process settings.

As a default, the review questions are numerical ratings for Event Fit, Topic, Creativeness, and Trendiness. You can use these questions or come up with your own.

You can create multiple review processes wherein each process may have different sets of review form questions depending on the answers given in the session proposal.

For example, in the default review form, there are 4 questions, but you want to add an extra question for reviewers if in the session proposal, they selected "Customer Support" as the topic. You want to know from reviewers if this session can be an opener for the event.

To apply this condition, you'll need to create a Review Process with that specific criterion.

When a session proposal is submitted, and they match the criteria of a Review Process, the questions that the reviewer will see for this session will be the questions particularly for that Review Process.

When a session proposal does not match any custom Review Process, then the Default Review Process will be assigned to that session.

You can take a look at the total under Matched Submissions to know how many sessions are assigned to the process.

In the Reviewer Portal, reviewers can see the session name, who submitted the session, description and answers to custom questions. If you don't want reviewers to see who submitted the sessions, you can go to Sessions > Settings > Enable Blind Review to hide that information.

When applicants click the button from the landing page, they will see the introductory page (if enabled). The next step is to enter the reviewer's information, and at the end, they will see the confirmation page. They will also get the application request confirmation email if it's enabled.

Go to Reviewers > Applications to see all the reviewer applicants. Click an item to see the details.

In Reviewers > Applications, the status of a new applicant will be Pending. Click the dropdown menu in the Status column to change it from Pending to Waitlisted, Denied, or Approved. They will receive an email for the status change if the emails are enabled.

When you approve a reviewer, they will be added in Reviewers > Reviewers tab and will also receive an approval email if you have the automatic emails turned on. In your email, it's best to let them know that they will receive another email when a session is assigned to them.

In the Reviewers tab, you can manually add reviews without going through the application process. Just click the + Add Reviewer button. While adding a reviewer, you can also assign sessions.

Instead of adding reviewers one by one, you can upload a list of reviewers through CSV. Click Import Reviewers from the Reviewers menu, and select your CSV file to upload.

The template has 3 columns for First Name, Last Name and Email Address. You can click Download from the pop-up to get this template.

Once they are approved as reviewers, you can start assigning sessions to them. You can assign the reviewer to multiple sessions, or assign a session to multiple reviewers. We suggest turning on the Invitation Email so that they can receive this once a session is assigned to them.

Instead of manually assigning reviewers to sessions, you can Generate Assignments based on filters or rules that you create to easily assign them all at once.

You may add some exclusions and limitations first, then create the matching rules to efficiently assign reviewers to appropriate sessions.

In the Reviewers list, you'll see a "Freeze" option. When you freeze a reviewer, that means they will be excluded in the auto-generated assignments.

When you open a reviewer, you'll see an Assignment limit field where you can indicate the maximum number of assignments that will be given to them. This only applies to the auto-generated assignments. If you're assigning manually, you can override that number.

After determining the limitations per reviewer, you can go to Sessions > Submissions and click Reviewer Assignments, then click + Create Rule. Give your rule a name, and click + Add rule.

In this example, we asked session proposers what their industry is and we also asked reviewers which industries they want to review, so we entitled the rule "Review by Preferred Industry." Based on the given answers, we can assign reviewers based on their preferences.

When creating logic rules, there's always a trigger and an action. The trigger is the IF part of the settings, and the THEN part is the action.

In the IF settings, we set the conditions.

Condition 1: The session proposer answered "Event Management" in the Industry question.

Condition 2: The reviewer's preference contains "Event Management". We chose "contains" instead of "is" because the question is a multiple choice question. So if they picked multiple answers, then "is" will only apply for those who chose only Event Management.

This means IF the session's industry is Event Management AND the reviewer wants to review Event Management sessions, it will trigger the action below.

When creating your matching rules, the action will either be to match or don't match the session and reviewer based on the trigger you indicated.

In summary, if the session's industry is Event Management and the reviewer wants to review Event Management sessions, then assign the reviewer to the session.

You can add more rules within this rule, and when you're done, click Save. Your saved rule will be added to the right side menu, you can edit it, duplicate, deactivate, delete or run the rule. You can also add another group of rules.

If you click Save & Run after creating your rule, or click Run Matching, or Run this rule now, you'll see a list of matches that you can review. You can also make changes in the matches by clicking the dropdown on the Assigned Reviewers column.

In the example below, 2 sessions matched with multiple reviewers based on the conditions in the rules.

When you're satisfied with the matching, you can confirm the assignments and the reviewers will be notified that session proposals are assigned to them. Click Confirm Assignments.

When assignments are confirmed through the matching rules, they will receive a email notification with a button to Open the Review Portal, where they can start evaluating session proposals.

If multiple sessions are assigned to them, they will see the session titles listed in the email.

When reviewers click Open Review Portal from the email, it will open the Review Portal where all the sessions assigned to them will be displayed. They can see the session title, who submitted the session, description, answers to custom questions and the review form questions. After submitting their evaluation, reviewers can still go back and change their answers.

Reviewers can click the Can’t Review button if they need to recuse themselves from evaluating a session assigned to them. This will automatically remove them as a reviewer of the session when they Confirm Recusal.

When all reviewers have submitted their evaluation for a session, the session status will automatically change to Review Complete. This makes it easier for you to see which session proposals you can start assessing as an admin. You can look at the Review Status to see how many evaluations have been submitted.

To see the evaluations, you can open the session proposal and check the Reviews tab from the left side panel. Note that if the question is a numeric rating, it will show a chart, but for other questions, you'll need to view the full review or download it.

After careful analysis, you can decide to approve or deny the reviewed session.

To stop receiving session reviewer applications, disable the Receive Reviewer Applications toggle under Reviewer > Settings. When disabled, the link to the application form will be inaccessible to users, and the Apply button will be hidden from your event’s landing page.