Cvent Abstract Management is a submission management solution for academic conferences, providing a CTP workflow solution. The application may be integrated into Cvent Event Management.
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Submittable
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Submittable offers tools to launch, measure, and grow social impact programs, locally and globally. From grants and scholarships to awards and CSR programs, Submittable partners with users to make a difference. The vendor states Submittable has supported over 95,000 social impact programs, receiving nearly 20 million applications, and that teams save an average of 12 hours per week and launch in an average of 14 days.
Preparing for conferences and gatherings is a demonstrated good use for this product. Similarly, other efforts that involve many moving pieces would be well-suited- projects with a number of different participants/authors, team retreats, and situations where there is a benefit to storing and organizing information in a decentralized way where no one person needs to bear that responsibility.
I highly recommend Submittable if your office manages applications. It saved us thousands of hours annually, it’s easy to learn, straightforward to setup applications, including unique applications, and easy for applicants to submit and track their applications (applicants can even save and return to their apps later, get automatic deadlines reminders, and track their app status). For reviewers, it’s easy even for non-tech savvy folks to review and rate app synchronously and asynchronously.
Advanced reporting is far from advanced. There are SO many limitations and the need to manually do so many things in order to get the report structure you want, and it is not intuitive. The reporting is by far the most frustrating thing about Submittable and actually adds on staff time instead of cutting it down.
PDFs of submissions should include all supplemental files uploaded in the submission. You should not have to do massive exports with zip files and then merge everything manually to get one PDF of submitted content for simplified records or sharing.
We should be able to see the account emails and names of individuals who have started a draft submission. In our former system (GIFTS online via Blackbaud), we could see that information and could reach out personally to applicants to ensure they didn't miss deadlines and could remove emails from our reminder communications from those we knew already submitted and simply opened up an accidental additional draft. When we send reminders in Submittable to draft submissions, without fail, we get 5-10 people who reach out and are upset because they already submitted but think this means they didn't, regardless of how we word the email and tell them they may have an extra draft if they think they already submitted.
You should be able to simply build one report in whatever format you need and be able to switch between different projects that use the same exact form fields. My team has the same exact form used for nine different grant programs because they are the same programs, just for different local communities, but we have to build out the same report manually each cycle for each community.
We use this software annually to help with our grant processes. Without it, I'd be so lost! Our team relies on the data from our past years to sift applications and we try to prioritize those who have applied and been a finalist but perhaps didn't win in years prior
Submittable is very user friendly. Even our less tech-savvy team members were able to navigate Submittable and achieve what was necessary. The single limitation is that it is not easy to move information/documents/applications from the Submittable platform into other platforms, or even to download documents from Submittable into a separate storage system
We have thankfully never experienced an outage nor been affected by a technology issue on Submittable's side that has delayed our grant process. We have instead been able to distribute over $6M in donated dollars to AAPI small business owners because Submittable is trustworthy and available
We've had a quick and efficient submittable experience that has always been easy to use. When we need a report it downloads within seconds, even the larger reports are 30 seconds or less to download. Pages are quick to load and reports complete in a more than reasonable time frame
Support has been great! The chat feature is phenomenal and every agent I have talked to has gotten back to me instantly with a solution, or done a fantastic follow up on where a status of an issue is. I have been very impressed with the professional demeanor and help I have gotten from Cvent support. They are even available at odd hours of the night
I think that they are good at answering our questions and solving our problems. We occasionally get reports from applicants about problems the Submittable team has not solved, but I do not know what the applicant has done to get the problem solved.
We did not receive in-person training technically, it was virtual but it was one on one with a specialist. They were very patient and skilled - she knew everything about the program and honed in on features that would help make our jobs easier. We are so grateful for the training!
10/10 because we were able to meet virtually and still get all of our questions answered! Online was effective too because we could easily record the sessions and review them later. Since we had to onboard our reviewers virtually, it was actually convenient that this was the same method we learned how to use the entire program virtually too.
I would say, provide Submittable as much detailed information on your planned use of the platform and your desires with the platform as possible, and the implementation will be tailored to accommodate your organization with minimal lag time and issues/problems.
This was already in place when I started at my organization. Because I can import or transfer the speaker info into the event management side, it’s a great option. The other two software work too but I’d have to import their info into the system instead of it being there already
We used SlideRoom for ease of development and quick turnaround time. We didn't have much time to launch the program, so we went with something that was familiar to many.
Pricing is fair for the product and support received, and we are content with the billing being annual in order to save overall. Contract terms are fair, and don't seem inflated for any reason. Pricing per application is also fair, and you can actually have the applicant absorb the cost if necessary
We were happy to use this for many projects, but sometimes it can be hard to filter for a specific applicant and see how many of our projects and grants they have applied to without filtering by project. We're also hoping to have the feature added where reviewers can only see one project at a time if they don't have clearance to view all of the projects
Submittable has improved the applicant experience because it provides such a clean and streamlined interface for applicants
Submittable saves us lots of time and stress, again, because we can easily assign colleagues or partners to applications to help score and review applications and because all the financial and privacy data we collect the platform are securely stored.
