Submittable vs. YourCause CSRconnect

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Submittable
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
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.
$10,000
per year
YourCause CSRconnect
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
CSRconnect is a SaaS-based platform that is a fully hosted and managed solution used to engage employees in volunteering, giving, and sustainability initiatives, along with helping grants administrators manage corporate and foundation philanthropic programs. It supports global programs with multi-lingual settings and multi-national credit card processing features.N/A
Pricing
SubmittableYourCause CSRconnect
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SubmittableYourCause CSRconnect
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsProduct pricing varies based on company needs and employee size.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
SubmittableYourCause CSRconnect
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
SubmittableYourCause CSRconnect
Small Businesses
Blackbaud Grantmaking
Blackbaud Grantmaking
Score 9.0 out of 10
Submittable
Submittable
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
MIP Fund Accounting
MIP Fund Accounting
Score 8.7 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Enterprises
Workday Financial Management
Workday Financial Management
Score 8.3 out of 10

No answers on this topic

All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
SubmittableYourCause CSRconnect
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(73 ratings)
8.5
(16 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.9
(5 ratings)
7.8
(5 ratings)
Usability
8.4
(69 ratings)
6.8
(14 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(1 ratings)
7.5
(2 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(1 ratings)
5.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
9.9
(4 ratings)
7.3
(14 ratings)
In-Person Training
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
10.0
(1 ratings)
7.1
(3 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(3 ratings)
5.5
(14 ratings)
Configurability
8.0
(1 ratings)
7.0
(2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
6.5
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.0
(1 ratings)
6.5
(2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
10.0
(1 ratings)
6.0
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
10.0
(1 ratings)
6.5
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
SubmittableYourCause CSRconnect
Likelihood to Recommend
Submittable
We love using Submittable for our grant applications. Sometimes, we've run into issues with filters inside the system not clearing -- and we lose access to some of our information. Submittable Customer Service is quick to respond and assist us in solving our problems quickly to get back up and running. We find their training videos to help us learn new ways to use the system.
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Blackbaud
It is a great solution for a company that is looking to have a one-stop shop for employee volunteering and giving. It integrates with VolunteerMatch and Workday which is very helpful as the former feeds community volunteer opportunities to our company portal, and the latter is how payroll deductions get processed
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Pros
Submittable
  • Applicant (submitter) experience is positive, user-friendly.
  • The ability to message directly with submitters within the portal in relation to their submission is a great feature.
  • Application creation is very easy.
  • Adding labels to submissions makes filtering simple and customizable to our needs.
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Blackbaud
  • Dollars for Doers Volunteer Grant program features are very easy to use and manage.
  • Cause cards are a great incentive available through CSR connect.
  • Searching for charities to contribute dollars to is easy to navigate.
  • The Engagement Elements are very user-friendly and easy to update on the admin side. Our employees love them and how easy they are to find and click through.
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Cons
Submittable
  • 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.
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Blackbaud
  • Date/calendar feature is rough - it automatically puts in a year out so you have to correct that and the time zone needs to automatically populate as it's a huge list that confuses most people.
  • The search feature overall - not intuitive and clunky and usually inaccurate - needs to be fine tuned as well as broadened to include everything associated with a particular event or user - having said that they have made great improvements in this in the recent future so that's something to be grateful for.
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Likelihood to Renew
Submittable
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
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Blackbaud
We have thoroughly enjoyed our relationship with CSRconnect and YourCause/Blackbaud thus far.
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Usability
Submittable
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
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Blackbaud
The usability of CSRconnect is light years ahead of our last program and we are so thankful for this. Some of our employees get intimidated by using the computer so it is helpful when the site is user-friendly and welcoming for our employees. They are also easily able to find events in the portal.
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Reliability and Availability
Submittable
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
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Blackbaud
It is available when needed. It can be very slow at times.
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Performance
Submittable
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
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Blackbaud
We do have issues with having to reload pages when we are working on reports or engagement tiles. If we dont reload something the information that we have been working to input in to the site or the reports do not save. This can be frustrating when we are on time constraints
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Support Rating
Submittable
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.
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Blackbaud
The implementation process was a bit rocky but ended up okay. The account manager is new and still learning himself so many of our questions are answered with "let me look into that and get back to you". He absolutely gets back to us and is very nice but not always very knowledgeable which can get frustrating.
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In-Person Training
Submittable
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!
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Blackbaud
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Submittable
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.
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Blackbaud
It was a little challenging doing training on line i think in person may have been a little easier. we also did training before we had access to certain things so when the time came to use that training we had questions that came up that were not apart of the initial training.
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Implementation Rating
Submittable
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.
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Blackbaud
The implementation of CSRconnect takes way, way too long. Having to take down your entire CSR site for weeks, if not months, is an issue. Issues still arise from the implementation in terms of ensuring that reports and statistics on active users are pulling properly, as well as the transfer of information from one system to another. Some of this is definitely to be expected, as transferring this much information is a challenge. However, I would hope that issues would have been resolved by now
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Alternatives Considered
Submittable
When it comes to collecting applications, no one beats Submittable in terms of features and functionality. With other software we used, there were far too many limitations, including having to manually download data, inability to use logic for fields, and no analytics. The other products we used for application collection could not compare to Submittable.
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Blackbaud
No answers on this topic
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Submittable
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
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Blackbaud
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Submittable
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
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Blackbaud
It has worked for our large company fine.
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Return on Investment
Submittable
  • Ease of training new employees with the system, simple interface and similar to other CRMs, etc.
  • We can launch a new grant fairly quickly now that we have the processes down and templates created
  • Ability to respond quickly to provider questions/needs
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Blackbaud
  • We have been able to more accurately track global volunteerism.
  • Having an online platform for employees to organize their team volunteer projects has been wonderful. They are either doing more of them (we are so busy) or they were always doing all these activities but we are just finally aware of them because there is a platform to use now.
  • Reporting is not as flexible nor robust as we need it. Still doing many manual steps to get the data how we need it.
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ScreenShots

YourCause CSRconnect Screenshots

Screenshot of CSRconnect is an Employee Engagement Platform for enterprise clients of all sizes, providing a hosted solution for a broad array of corporate community involvement programs and clients are able to manage and report the depth of their social impact and overall employee engagement.Screenshot of Grants ManagementScreenshot of NPO Portal - Free management of donated funds and volunteer information.