Thanks for an amazing 2024!
It’s been an incredible year. Together, we ran almost 30,000 programs, welcomed over 1.2M applicants, and managed over $10B in funds.
Behind the numbers is so. much. good. work. Let’s take a peek at just a few Submittable customers’ excellent work:
- The Appalachia Regional Food Business Center launched a new $16 million Business Builder Subawards program to connect local producers with federal dollars intended to create a stronger, more equitable food economy. Read the story.
- The Lindsey Vonn Foundation invested $1 million dollars in scholarships for girls from underserved communities. Supporting girls aged 10-18, the LVF aims to provide support for girls at a time in their life when they most need it. Read the story.
- In partnership with US Bank, a state government client delivered $500 million in bonuses as a thank you to frontline workers—without sacrificing security. The program was awarded the Banking Tech Award for Best Bank & Fintech Partnership. Read the story.
(We bet you’re proud of your good work, too. If you’d like Submittable to highlight and celebrate it, tell us a little more about your program today.)
Thank you so much for trusting us with these and other crucial programs, which we know do so much to make our world a better place. We’re doing our best to live up to our end of the bargain—read on for more of our 2024 recap.
Evolving our product
Part of what made all this good work possible is Submittable’s product. Let’s take a look at how it evolved in the past year by running through the top five major feature releases from 2024.
- Draft Submissions Enhancements
We were thrilled to deliver the ability to view the content of draft submissions and communicate with those who had started but not yet submitted. As one webinar attendee exclaimed, “This new Draft Submission feature is amazing!! :)”
You are all using this feature to help your applicants and improve your programs:
- “It is also helpful that we can now access draft applications to help people through the process.” City Arts and Culture Manager
- “We use the drafts they start to discuss how to improve their projects.” Fernando Rojas, Japan ICU Foundation
- Edit Submission Responses
Our next biggest crowd pleaser from 2024 is definitely the top requested feature that I have seen in my five-plus years as a product marketer at Submittable: the ability for administrators to edit submissions.
While originally, this had been intentionally omitted from our new form builder for data security purposes, our product team found a way to create transparency throughout the process in a way consistent with our commitment to privacy and data security.
As a lontime Submittable customer said, “I appreciate that the ability to edit submissions internally has come back.” Arts Director at an Art Organization
- Transfer Submission Ownership
Number three in the roundup is the ability for both administrators and applicants to transfer the individual owner of a submission. For collaborative teams, this is a major time-saver—since previously, you had to contact our support team.
A major reason submissions need to be transferred is due to staff turnover. As one webinar attendee put it, “This has been useful with applicant org staff turnover, when email accounts closed down/lost etc.”
Sometimes, applicants wearing different hats get involved in the application or progress reporting at different times across a program lifecycle. Another webinar attendee said, “This was useful for us when ownership has to be transferred from a CEO to a new Development Manager for one of our submitters.”
Another customer said, “It is great that we now have the ability to make small changes to records and transfer submission ownership.” Jen Shih, Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District
- Smart Import
2024 is the year that we released our first three AI-powered features.
One of them in particular makes a huge difference for funders collecting official tax forms—Smart Import. Smart Import is a form field that uses AI to extract critical information from official documents like 1099s and W2s. It makes things easier on your team and your applicants, eliminating the need for manual data entry while also reducing human error.
As one of our focus group participants observed, “I think that looks really, really cool like it would save a lot of time for the applicants as well.” Maud Lyon, Capacity Grant Program Administrator, Forgotten Harvest
Another quipped, noting the ease of use: “It was harder to locate the file on my computer than upload it. The info was easy to read once uploaded.” Josh Koller, Research and Assessment Coordinator, Tennessee Board of Regents
Learn more about AI at Submittable.
- Custom Placeholder Tags
Rounding out our top five best new features of 2024 is Custom Placeholder Tags, the ability for you to designate a question on your form to later be used as a Placeholder Tag in your email communications.
One customer loved it: “Tags within response templates – especially the new custom tags that allow us to pull in application responses!! This is going to save us lots of time.” Collaboration Partner at a NPO
See it in action
That wasn’t it for 2024—you can check out the full list of recent releases anytime at New at Submittable. Want to see it live? The team and I will be demoing all of these features live at our 2024 roundup—don’t miss it! Register now.
Joining forces with WizeHive
Our biggest news from 2024 of course was acquiring WizeHive and its brands Bright Funds and WeHero.
WizeHive has for years shared Submittable’s mission of providing top-notch software to people and organizations. working to further social good across industries. By joining forces, we are poised to innovate even faster and become more responsive to your feedback about how your tech can make your lives better and your work more efficient and powerful.
In Bright Funds, the Submittable family gained an employee volunteering and giving solution with an industry-leading 8 million international vetted nonprofits ready for donations. With choice being an enormous factor in participation, no wonder Bright Funds is the highest rated CSR software on Capterra.
We also added WeHero, which provides the highest quality volunteer experiences to in person, hybrid, and remote teams. WeHero event participants in 2024 numbered 36,000 and 98% of participants say the experience left them feeling more engaged with their company.
As a united company, we’ve already made huge strides in exploring how our people and technology can better serve our customers in the future. We can’t wait to introduce new innovations and opportunities to you in 2025.
Walking the walk
While the most important thing we do as a company is support the good work of our customers, like many of you, we also consider how we can show up as a company to reflect our values.
After bringing Bright Funds into the Submittable suite, we decided to rethink the corporate grant programs we’ve offered in the past. Instead of a few large gifts decided by committee, put the money and the decisions directly into the hands of employees, with each employee able to direct $150 in giving, to any of those afore-mentioned 8 million international nonprofits.
We continued to work to elevate voices in the industry pushing you, us, and our peers to do better. For instance, season four of Impact Audio covered topics such as how GivingTuesday went from grassroots movement to data powerhouse (with Woodrow Rosenbaum) to a guide to social impact messaging (with Erin Combs). Our blog featured content such as real-life lessons on equity for government grantmakers and how nonprofits can safely and practically begin using AI through a “trust but verify” lens. Live conversations included a panel of three United Way customers, compliance tips in the wake of changes to Uniform Guidance, and strategies for CSR professionals to grow social impact budgets.
We hope that you got a chance to dig into some of all this—and that what we produce inspires you, educates you, and reinvigorates you in the vast opportunities of the field to get a little better everyday and make huge impacts over time.
Thank you
From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for being on this journey with us. We couldn’t do it without you, and we hope you feel that we contribute to your work as well. That’s what it’s all about. Here’s to further progress in the right direction in 2025 and beyond—together.
Natalya is the director of product marketing at Submittable and is focused on helping organizations get a ton of value out of the platform. She is a bookworm, adventure enthusiast and card-carrying cat lady as well as a writer and yogi.