Submittable is your communication savior!
Updated July 28, 2023

Submittable is your communication savior!

Emily (Wong Loi Sing) Fuder | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Submittable

We use Submittable to run grant projects with funding provided by our corporate sponsors. We needed a platform to distribute over $2m in funds in 2021, and Submittable was secure, organized, and easy to use for our needs. We wanted to have reviews be fair and impartial by concealing specific applicant information and having applicants submit forms to submittable instead of emailing our team repeatedly helped us orchestrate the grants seamlessly.
  • 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.
  • Submittable allowed us to run a $2m nationwide grant project with only two team members. We wouldn't have been able to successfully run the grant application without Submittable building an infrastructure for success.
  • We were able to respond to every applicant's question within 24 hours because of Submittable's easy-to-use email templates.
  • Our applicants could immediately see if their application had been submitted or not without us having to use any employee time to send manual updates.
For our regional grant opportunity, we had to create 15 different grant applications (using the same basic template, but with different eligibility questions). So it became cumbersome to check on each region separately. We would've preferred one application with more filters on regions so that we could see immediately how each region was doing application-wise. Some of the reporting too is clumsy and shouldn't require checking so many boxes to see responses/filters.
Submittable was great for the applications, but once we had winners, we started communicating with them via our own email address because so many Submittable communications were blocked. If there's an opportunity to "white label" an email and say it's coming from my organization instead of submittable (similar to how our email provider Active Campaign can white label) that would help us with bounce rates and staying connected.
Submittable vs Google Forms is a no-brainer. Yes, you have to make a profile for Submittable, but it takes only a few minutes. Google Forms doesn't have an intuitive or easy way to sort applications or provide a review process. With Submittable, we can track multiple projects at a time without using spreadsheets at all if we choose. It's intuitive, easy to navigate, and one of the best products out there to seamlessly manage a grant or application process from beginning to end.

Do you think Submittable delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Submittable's feature set?

Yes

Did Submittable live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Submittable go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Submittable again?

Yes

Submittable is wonderful for running large-scale grant programs where you're collecting sensitive data, need to have reviewers, and sort through data. It would be less appropriate for a very small grant opportunity and maybe not worth the money if you're only accepting, say, 50 applications. But for one grant we had 1,500 applicants and 196 winners, and the other grant had 252 applications received for our 27 grants. Communication was wonderful, but some applicants reported being locked out of the accounts and very confused on how to get back in/hear if they'd won or not. Sometimes, Submittable was blocked/sent to their spam emails.

Using Submittable

5 - We have our grants and programs team use Submittable to track applications, gather success stories, pull reports for our sponsors, and show impact on a large scale and micro scale within specific regions. Our team also contracts out work to third party reviewers to help us authenticate businesses who have applied using our forms.
2 - Submittable fully trained our in-house support team the moment we signed our contract. We had multiple onboarding calls to fully implement the program and use it to its full capacity because of our amazing account manager. The entire team is committed to teaching my team everything we need to know to run our software successfully.
  • Grant Applications
  • Impact Reporting
  • Reviewing
  • We're able to clean our data and provide snapshots of true economic need based on regions via our survey questions in applications.
  • We've used the impact reporting feature to show future donors what their dollars could do.
  • Reaching new audiences through tagging opportunities
  • Growing our base audience overall through tagging
  • Offering review to other organizations to increase our own funding
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.

Evaluating Submittable and Competitors

  • Scalability
  • Ease of Use
We wanted to have a program that would make grant applications easy to sort through, rank, review, and prioritize. Ultimately, this program was used by another organization who had run a similar grant we were pursuing, so we ended up signing on as well since it worked so well for our partner organization too. It's been great for us to be familiar with it since other organizations have partnered with us for reviews too!
The pricing was perfect for us, initially it came in out of our budget but the Submittable team was able to work with our budget and make this opportunity happen. I had to sit down with our COO at the time and convince him that this was the only option vs. Google Forms since our team didn't have capacity to sift through 10,000 Google Forms!

Submittable Implementation

Having Ali as our implementation specialist was amazing. She was patient and scheduled calls for the best times for us. She made sure we had the best foot forward to launch our grant successfully. Because of the implementation, we ran a successful first grant and attracted attention from other major corporate donors to run even more grant opportunities. Thank you!
Change management was minimal - We never used a program for grant applications beyond Submittable, so we didn't experience major changes.
  • For our first grant we did 15 separate applications by region, and it was tedious to organize and rank since they weren't in the same project. The following year, we changed our strategy with just one project and we filtered by states to determine regions.

Submittable Training

  • Online Training
  • In-Person Training
  • No Training
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.
The product would NOT be as easy to use without training, especially with the report function. We highly recommend using the training approach since yes, the program is easy to navigate, but you could be missing out on really great features that the implementation specialist will show you in a few minutes!

Configuring Submittable

We think the configuration is too limited. We'd prefer if we could adjust access levels for our reviewers to only view specific projects instead of our entire database of applications over the years. We're also hoping to provide a lock on labels, since some reviewers add labels in that personally mean something to them on an application... but that doesn't correlate to the review process. This ability to label makes the next round of reviewers confused.
When you're setting up Submittable, make sure you do the virtual onboarding with a specialist. Do not skip this! They will help understand the grant or project you're preparing for, and help you configure it completely. We use initial review forms to determine eligibility and save some time for our applicants if they are not eligible. We highly suggest this.
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
No - we have not done any custom code
We did not do any additional configuration or customization to Submittable.

Submittable Support

The Submittable team has been nothing but supportive. We truly look forward to our calls with the team since they are all patient, funny, kind, and supportive. They always help us understand the problem and show us ways to avoid the same issue in the future. If they don't know the answer, they find it an immediately follow up. If I could rate the support team a 15/10, I would.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
I'm not sure if we purchased premium support, but we have always been very happy with the support received and the initial onboarding with my team in 2021. We're so used to our issues getting caught in a black hole for our other tech programs, but Submittable truly stands out from the rest with top notch customer service.
Yes - Yes, we reported a bug last year with a filtering issue, and it was resolved within 24 hours.
Ali Solomon provided all of our onboarding and was one of the most patient, instructional teachers. It never felt tedious, and she came at it with many ways to accomplish the task. She provided autonomy and suggestions and felt invested in our cause. We were overjoyed with the quality of her support and work in the onboarding.

Using Submittable

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Filtering for assigned reviews is extremely easy
  • Reading applications side by side to the review is wonderful
  • We enjoy the embedded videos and photos in the applications
  • The impact reporting has saved us days of design and work
  • We wish Submittable provided a feature to assign reviewers access to only specific projects. The levels of access are wonderful, but it's missing the ability to hide projects from reviewers who may not be involved with it.
  • Sometimes the video or attachments don't stream correctly, and require a download to the desktop in order to view the full application.
  • We wish we could get half filled in applications just to gather data. We've had 5,000 submissions in draft mode whose data we completely missed because they never hit submit. There may have been other ways for us to support them beyond grants if we had access to their half-filled out application.

Submittable Reliability

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.
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.

Integrating Submittable

  • Salesforece
We've wanted to integrate to salesforce but haven't had the manpower or expertise to fully send the data over.
  • File import/export
N/A we have not done an integration

Relationship with Submittable

Submittable is flexible and understands the constraints we're working with from a donation perspective. We had a donor come through very late with funding and we were scrambling to renew our product. The vendor was understanding and provided a modified schedule for us to not lose any data, but to still pay them once we had our funding availble.
The team at Submittable is truly top notch. We have only experienced excellent customer service, hospitality, patience, humor, and joy from the team. Even after the sale, the next account manager takes on the project with zest and wants our team to be successful in using the technology to its full extent.
We were able to negotiate a start date that made the most sense for our renewal based on the donation cycle, the amount of licenses we needed to successfully run the projects, and submission allowances that fit our anticipated application count. Ultimately if we need more submissions we know we can buy them!
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.
They will always be on the ball and follow up! Be honest with the dates you're working with and don't leave your sales team hanging. They have goals and deadlines too, be up front and be helpful in return. If you have a constraint, share it with them. If you aren't the decision maker, tell them that too, and tell them the barriers you're having to getting your contract signed. They're often creative and willing to work with you to close the deal.

Upgrading Submittable

  • The amount of licenses we upgraded to helped us run two concurrent projects from major donors and contract out the reviews to third parties
  • Reviewers having access to specific projects
  • Labeling being only available to specific access levels instead of to all