WEPAN, the Women in Engineering ProActive Network, runs the ARC Network and its annual conference, a cornerstone of its work advancing equity in engineering. Every year that conference depends on a proposal review process: collecting submissions, assigning them to reviewers, gathering scores, and making decisions.
That entire process was being run by hand, on email, Google Forms, and spreadsheets. Reviewers manually entered scores and tracked feedback, consuming hours of staff time. Managing proposals and reviewers across spreadsheets created version confusion and missed reviews. And because nothing was centralized, leadership had no visibility into where things stood. The system worked, barely, but it was fragile, slow, and invisible to the people who needed to see it most.
WEPAN needed a scalable, automated system that improved efficiency without sacrificing the accuracy of evaluations. Rather than forcing their process into an off-the-shelf tool, Noteworthy Lab designed and built a custom, end-to-end proposal review system around their existing workflows and data needs.
The system runs the whole process. A public-facing Call for Proposals page lays out the guidelines and requirements. A structured submission form automates intake and eliminates the inconsistent entries that plagued the old spreadsheets. A secure reviewer portal lets external reviewers log in, see the proposals assigned to them, and submit scores. And scoring is calculated automatically against a rubric WEPAN designed, removing manual math and the errors that came with it. We built it on Webflow, Jotform, and Glide, a lean stack that delivered real software without a heavyweight build.
The goal was a system that fit the work, not the other way around. Because it was built around WEPAN's actual review process, reviewers and staff could step into it without relearning how they operate.
The new system moved WEPAN from reactive, manual coordination to a proactive, data-informed process, in weeks rather than months.
The redesigned art templates and the per-episode clip workflow mean the upgrade keeps paying off: every new episode ships looking the part and arrives ready to be distributed, not just published.
Spreadsheets were eliminated in favor of a purpose-built system for tracking submissions and reviews. External reviewers moved to an intuitive portal. Automated scoring brought fairness and accuracy to every evaluation. And for the first time, leadership had real-time visibility into data they had never been able to see, while the hours once lost to administrative follow-up were redirected to mission-critical work.
