Setting up your first programme

This guide takes an empty organisation to an open application window. It assumes you are the organisation owner or a programme administrator, and that you have decided what the call is for. Allow about forty minutes if your rubric and form questions already exist on paper, and a working morning if they do not.

Before you start

Have these ready. Collecting them first turns the setup into typing rather than deciding.

• The call document as your institution will publish it: eligibility, dates, what is funded, how decisions are made.
• A logo in PNG or SVG on a transparent background, and your primary brand colour as a hex value.
• The application questions, grouped roughly into stages, with a note against each of which are mandatory.
• The rubric: criteria, weights and the descriptor at each anchor point. If you have not written descriptors yet, write them before evaluators are invited, not after.
• The evaluator list: names, email addresses and, where the programme uses them, sector tags for auto-assignment.
• Four dates: window opens, window closes, evaluation deadline, decision announced.

Step 1: create the organisation

The organisation is the tenant: your university, research park or accelerator. Everything else — programmes, evaluators, submissions, reports — belongs to it.

1. Sign in and create the organisation with its full public name, the one applicants will recognise.
2. Set the contact address that applicant email will appear to come from and be replied to.
3. Add the colleagues who need administrative access, with the smallest role that lets them do their job. An organisation owner can change plans and branding; a programme administrator cannot, and most of your team should be the latter.

Step 2: set the branding

Branding is applied per organisation and appears on the public application form, the applicant portal and outgoing email.

1. Upload the logo. Check it against both the light and dark themes; a logo with a white background will show as a white block on dark.
2. Set the primary colour. Keep contrast in mind — a pale institutional gold that looks fine on a letterhead will fail as button text on white.
3. Write the sign-in copy applicants see: one line naming the institution and the call.

If your plan does not include white-labelling, applicants see the IdeaScore mark instead. Nothing else in this guide changes.

Step 3: create the programme

A programme is one call: a competition, a cohort or a funding round. Name it the way it will be referred to in six months, including the year — "Seed Fund 2026, Cohort III" ages better than "Seed Fund".

1. Create the programme and set its public description from the call document. Do not paraphrase; applicants will compare the two.
2. Set the window dates. The closing date and time is the one applicants will test at the last minute, so set the time zone explicitly.
3. Set the capacity, if the call has one. A hard cap on total submissions closes the form when it is reached; leave it empty if the call is uncapped.
4. Decide whether applicants may edit after submitting and until when. Permitting edits until the window closes removes most duplicate submissions before they happen.

Step 4: build the form

Build the form as stages rather than one long page. Applicants complete a long application across several sittings, and stages give them a visible sense of progress and a natural place to stop.

A first-call structure that works: About the team, The idea, Technology and readiness, Plan and budget, Declarations and uploads. Five stages, twelve to twenty fields each.

Mark only what you will actually enforce as mandatory. Every mandatory field is a place where an applicant abandons a draft at eleven at night. Attach the call document and any templates as resources on the relevant stage, so the applicant does not have to find them again.

Building a form in detail has its own guide: building a multi-stage application form.

Step 5: invite evaluators

Invite evaluators before the window closes, not after. They need time to accept, set a password and look around, and about one in six invitations goes to a mistyped address.

1. Add evaluators with name, email and sector tags. Tags drive auto-assignment later.
2. Send the invitations, then check the list a day later for anyone who has not accepted.
3. Ask each evaluator to declare conflicts of interest. Collect these before assignment — declaring a conflict after reading an application is too late to fix cleanly.
4. Set each evaluator's capacity if they have told you how many reads they can take. The assignment step will respect it.

Step 6: define the rubric

The rubric belongs to the round, not to the programme, so a screening round and a jury round can use different ones.

1. Add each criterion with its name, its maximum points and its scale. Five criteria with weights summing to 50 is a good default.
2. Write the descriptor at the low, middle and high anchor for every criterion. This is the step that decides whether your committee trusts the ranking; there is a longer argument for it in how to design a rubric committees trust.
3. Decide whether the round is blind, and whether evaluators must leave a comment when scoring below a threshold.
4. Score one real or sample application yourself against the rubric before anyone else sees it. Problems in a rubric are obvious on first use and invisible on the page.

Step 7: open the window

1. Preview the form end to end as an applicant, on a phone as well as a laptop.
2. Submit one test application, then delete it. Confirm the acknowledgement email arrives and reads correctly.
3. Publish the public link and put it on your institution's page. The link is stable, so it can go into printed material.
4. Open the window and confirm the status shows as open on the public page.
5. Announce. Keep the case-number format and the decision date in the announcement; both reduce support email substantially.

Checklist before you announce

• Organisation named, logo uploaded, primary colour set and contrast checked
• Reply-to address tested with a real message
• Programme description matches the call document word for word
• Window dates set with an explicit time zone, capacity decided
• Every form stage previewed on a phone
• Mandatory fields limited to what will be enforced
• Call document and templates attached as resources
• Evaluators invited, acceptances chased, conflicts declared
• Rubric criteria, weights and descriptors complete, and tested on one application
• Test submission made, acknowledgement received, test record removed
• Public link live and the status showing as open