Submittable

Database of our child care providers and their grants

Managing communications from email, notes section, ability to pull up review while on calls, attaching necessary documents

Segmenting the data by project

Labels! Please allow us to segment these out by project and not have a complete running list of all labels ever used...the scrolling is getting out of hand!

Better document retrieval and storage - documents uploaded to the application are not easily viewed and I often have to download them, making this time-consuming.

When closing out a document, the submission returns you to the top of the page instead of anchoring to your location.

Make it easier to pull data!

Great customer service.

Reviewers are able to see all documents on one screen instead of opening multiple windows in order to review the application.

Applications are easy to build and edit.

The review portions is user friendly.

Applicants find the forms easy to use.

The CRM functionality is new and not user-friendly for those not using UEIs to track applicants.

There doesn't seem to be an easy or cost effective way to use an outside CRM source.

Limited functionality with multiple languages - we need to build one application in English and another in Spanish to meet the needs of our users.

Application Organization.

Flexible review systems.

Easy Communication with applicants and reviewers.

I'd love to be able to bulk send attachments that are specific to each applicant.

I wish there were support you could chat live with on the site instead of email (though email is pretty swift, sometimes the question needs to be reiterated through a few emails).

Streamlining the review process

Verifying application information

Automating processes

Easy form builders

Inclusion of the ability to rank preferences in an application form response, i.e., rank the following in order of preference.

Easier way to navigate between applications within a project

Project Management: Review Processes between internal users are great. You can allow for different permissions based on their requirements for each project.

Reducing Barriers: With Submittable you can make questions as simple or as complex as you want. It's also great that you can allow applicants to invite colleagues to assist their efforts in filling the application.

Labels: This is a great tool to use internally as you can apply as many labels as you wish to each application that comes through - then later, sort by each.

Lack of CRM: At this time, there is a surface-level CRM that allows us access to the history of applications through one organization (if everything was set up correctly). But, unless you put the work into your own methods, this tool is just 'ok' as is.

Limited Customization: Specifically for the labels, you cannot customize the color. Small, but very important detail.

Automation: Requires using third party platforms.

user friendly

intuitive interface

good communication

Ability to work with additional inboxes

more accessible financially

more frequent updates on product changes

Duplicate applications from year to year.

Assign reviewers.

Track the submissions process.

I could use a reminder to update the automatic reply when duplicating new application forms from year to year. By the time 365 days have passed, I've forgotten to update this.

Scoring

Collaboration on forms.

Tags for extra layers of organizing.

Flexibility for form creation - including branching!

Continue to support more form design flexibility.

Ability to hide a form question without deleting it from the existing form - for example, once a shift is filled - it'd be helpful to hide it so other shifts are shown as high need but without changing already entered responses.

It would be great to see more auto-label style functions for exporting and reports and ease of data organization.

Drag and drop form creation.

Customer services.

Quest to update and provide the best experience.

Attentiveness to my perspective as a customer.

Ease of use and easy to adopt/learn the system.

Allowing of sharing of project across users.

The internal role differentiation could be more robust.

Changing/updating original submissions are not as intuitive as initial creation.

Data collection.

Reports

Rating submissions.

The functions could be organized in a more user friendly way.

keeping things in one place

allowing for multiple projects at once

downloading submissions option

user friendly interface for our clients

un-intuitive layout for backend users like me

hard to set up automated replies

unable to turn off status read or not which freaks our clients out

Hard to get to the actual submission

User friendly interface for building grant applications and application review forms

Easy to securely involve partners in building and scoring applications

Helpful and responsive customer service representatives

I hope they are developing a feature where correspondance to applicants can come from our organization's website and not Submittable's

We'd like a more robust integration with DocuSign where forms can be populated with a range of fields and executed documents can easily be saved to the appropriate application file

Review system provides first steps in the process

interface is very user friendly

Reports are very easy to pull specific information

The features for the forms have many options

Submissions page can get clunky if multiple programs are going on at the same time

The ability to change the look and feel of specific programs

Easier fund functionality

Saves time (thousands of hours)

Efficient and easy for making/collecting/reviewing applications

Very little training needed to get started and maintain

Easy to use, excellent customer service

Pricing and the pricing structure

List sorting of winners/labeled groups.

Ease of application creation/question creation.

Template building for quick responses to applicants.

Labels shouldn't be an option for all reviewers, we had a reviewer for our Florida applicants create labels like "1" "2" "3" which confused my reviewers in California.

Running reports across multiple grant projects is tedious and clumsy. Our grant project had 15 regions but it was the same application, we had to compare applications across regions, but could only have a set amount of winners for each area. It would've been easier to create 1 application and 1 opportunity but have filters for the # of applications for each region instead of creating 15 separate applications.

Reviewers also found the review forms difficult. There should be an easier way to run a report on their pending reviews in an excel format, or just a better functionality to review. Even with onboarding, our reviewers were confused and didn't use the review function.

Intuitive interface

Extensive search filters

Great for collaboration with my team

The interface be a little confusing at first

Potentially too easy to accidentally accept submissions without meaning to

Submission collecting

Review assigning

Comparing and compiling information

Reporting

Customizing the review process

Cost and package flexibility

User Friendly

Multi Tier Review

Customer Service

Adding New Features

The multiple notifications on the multi tier review was confusing for our volunteers

The automatic labels keep changing between the full state name and the initials

I would love to have a feature where if the applicant checks a box an email would automatically go out

Organizes manuscript submissions

Allow easy interaction with authors

Generic reply templates can easily be edited and make decision responses more streamlined

Larger file downloads would be helpful. As is, I have to create smaller versions of the submissions to review in some cases.

I would like to see a customized list template that users can create to add additional processes unique to their company.

If submissions are active, once they are reassigned as accepted/declined/etc., it would be nice if they would automatically go into a folder labeled with those same headings.

Create filters

preset automated responses

archive submissions

add publication dates

I wish I could pick the colors of the filters instead of Subimttable automatically picking them for me

I wish there was a way to see what blogs are being published on what days and have the info of the author and title of blog

I wish there was a way to log blog publications within submittable and have a calendar link I could synch to my microsoft account.

Quick and easy report generation

Customized applications

Clean interface

Messages are sometimes not delivered

Better customization of mass messages (often the user's name is not inputted correctly)

Organization

User-friendly interface

Customization

CSS Options

Pricing

Reporting

Easy submission for applicants

Useful functions for remote group discussion during review

Simple tools for categorizing, storing and organizing submissions

Once your Submittable subscription ends, you lose access to all stored information

It is not intuitive to move documents from Submittable into other software

The cost is high compared to some other data storage systems (Drive, Microsoft One)

It is easy to search through submissions

It is easy to create and edit forms

It is easy for even non-tech savvy users to navigate

I am not sure how to transmit information in our applications into spreadsheets

Moving data out from Submittable is not especially easy

People with very low tech experience still require some coaching to use Submittable

Applications are easy to build.

It's very user-friendly for applicants and reviewers (most drawbacks are for internal staff).

Support is usually quick to respond and they are all very friendly. Their staff in general are always great to work with – which is (and was) a huge selling point.

Their blog posts and guides are informative and extremely on point with where philanthropy should be/is heading – human-centered, trust-based approaches.

The organization is clearly leaning into/improving/advocating for accessibility, equity, and inclusivity in the submission and review processes.

They are continually adding features or making small updates based on user feedback.

If wanting built-in CRM functionality for ongoing management of awards and applicant communications, this won't be the right fit. There are not umbrella profiles for applicant organizations with contacts and submissions housed underneath; each application is wholly freestanding.

Emails frequently get caught in spam/junk/quarantine folders, regardless of safelisting the domain. Because we can't 100% rely on all system communications reaching the submitter or reviewer, we often handle communications externally instead or have to do additional follow up, which is added time and something we anticipated the system would streamline.

The level of implementation support is unfortunately a place where we feel we were misled following the demos. We anticipated more hands-on and extensive assistance that would remove the bulk of the burden from our grant program managers, but this wasn't our experience. The indicated support was a major factor for our company that led to our selection of Submittable.

Advanced reporting unfortunately doesn't live up to the name. There are several limitations that require extensive manual manipulation to get the report structure where you want; and it's not as intuitive or simple as other parts of the backend (such as form creation). Transparently, the reporting is by far the biggest headache for our program managers.

The #1 advanced reporting drawback is the data delay. Data received through any type of form is not immediately available upon submission for advanced reports (but oddly is instantaneous for standard reports). Additionally, the delay is inconsistent – sometimes three hours, sometimes 18, sometimes more. This impedes administrative efficiency for program managers and affects internal processing timelines; we have to build in extra days to prepare materials for reviewer meetings or any meeting where we may need a report quickly following submission. As a fail-safe given the uncertainty of up-to-date data, we now manually check and/or edit data once we've pulled a report into Excel. I personally have switched to only using standard reports and then build in time for a manual overhaul in Excel to get what I need in our preferred format. Despite the time this takes, it's always faster for me than waiting for data and then adjusting advanced reports.

Branding customization is limited, especially for organizations running multiple programs. Within our company, we support many clients who have their own brand and/or look; since they don't use our organization's branding, it can be confusing for applicants to have our company's logo anywhere near other applications. It would be nice to offer our clients their own branded landing page without paying for an entirely new account, considering we don't usually need a separate back end system.

The additional instructions for form fields appear under the response box rather than directly under the main question/header. This often results in applicants not seeing supplemental information, prompts, or guidelines until after they've provided their response.

Placeholder tags are limited. We'd truly love to utilize DocuSign for agreements but are unable to because we can't pull in all necessary field responses from the original submission.

The inability to edit an application for a submitter is a definite pain point. There may be something small, like a typo in their organization name, and everything following is impacted, e.g., all system communications where we use a placeholder tag for that field (another reason we can't use DocuSign). We've also had applicants mistype numbers somewhere and ask us to quickly update (in which case we'd keep their emails on file for record). Since that's not an option in Submittable, we open for editing and make them go through the work for something that could be remedied on our end in a matter of seconds. This hinders rapport with some applicants because the editing process can be confusing and frustrating for individuals who struggle with technology; and the back and forth to walk them through the editing process is time that could be spent elsewhere.

Not being able to see account emails and/or names of individuals for open submission drafts is a barrier. In our former system we could view basic information and personally reach out to applicants to ensure they didn't miss due dates. Additionally it enabled us to remove email addresses from reminder communications for those we knew already submitted and simply opened up an accidental additional draft. When we send these reminders in Submittable, we always get applicants reaching out panicked or annoyed because they already submitted but think this means we didn't receive it.

There's not an option to cc other emails when communicating with the submitter through the system. This can be limiting and requires us to move communications back into our personal inbox instead of keeping everything together in Submittable.

It's not possible to reassign submissions to a different email. This is needed in situations where a submitter has left an organization and a now defunct email was used for login as opposed to a generic company one (like info@). It makes future communications for reporting impossible through the system. There is such high turnover in nonprofits, especially in development departments, so this is an inevitable issue for many users.

Not all form fields are concealable – only those where answers can be inserted. It would be helpful to conceal text-only fields and dividers as there are moments when the content is obsolete to the reviewer. This is either because it's information there to guide applicants through the submission process OR because we've concealed all fillable fields in a section but then the section header and other text-only fields are still oddly hanging around. It can make the app look a bit off to reviewers and forces them to scroll through more content than they really need to.

Report structures cannot be duplicated and applied to different projects, which is vital for organizations with dozens of different funding programs or cycles throughout the year. This leads to so much extra manual work.

There's limited control over notification emails sent to assigned reviewers. You can't customize these, and if needing to quickly switch a submission back a stage for something, the second that submission is returned to the stage with external reviewers, they receive another email about that assignment, despite already getting the notice originally.

Submission PDFs are not customizable, which would be ideal to create clean and specific documents for sharing with board members or partners whom you won't provide access to in the system. Additionally, some reviewers like the option of printing, and the current formatting of the PDFs are not as reader-friendly as the online portal. Of particular note: rich text formatting doesn't carry over; monetary numbers throughout aren't comma delimited (this is an issue in the online reviewer view too) which can result in reviewers improperly reading a request amount.

Form uploads are not included within/at the end of submission PDF downloads. It's a lot of extra work to do bulk exports with zip files and then merge everything manually to get one PDF of submitted content for simplified recordkeeping and/or sharing with external parties as needed.

There are inconsistent/intermittent errors that occur when utilizing tables in applications, such as numbers disappearing entirely or not being calculated in the total if a $ is typed in originally. We've unfortunately had to find workarounds and make sure to add IFERROR formulas in the Excel file we upload to bypass the system errors.

There are numerous nitpicky things that cause difficulty on the back end. This is inevitable with any software or system; regardless, that doesn't make those quirks/limitations/etc. any less frustrating.