A monthly series to help you grow your expertise, use the platform to its utmost potential, and ultimately improve your programs.
This post was originally published in August 2024
This month, let’s talk about Organization Profiles! Continue reading to learn more about this robust, yet intuitive, feature that is readily available in your account.
Richer adaptability and relationship management with Organization Profiles
Over the past year, Submittable has continued to expand Organization Profiles, a CRM-like tool, that makes it easy for program administrators to build lasting relationships with their grantees and make better informed funding decisions. Organization Profiles provide administrators with a comprehensive dashboard of the applications, submitters, awards, and ongoing communications that are associated with a given organization or business. You can even add Custom Fields and Notes to keep track of any other information that you would like to tie to the organization’s profile.
Best of all, Organization Profiles integrate data from SAM.gov, Candid’s GuideStar, and other third party databases directly into Submittable, so you can have accurate entity information at your fingertips without having to collect it from applicants. Let’s dive into the various components of an Organization Profile dashboard.
Getting started with Organization Profiles
Capture entity-related data with the Project-Level setting ‘Organization Search’. Once an applicant begins the application intake process, they will be prompted to search for and select their affiliated business or organization by providing their entity’s unique ID. Once submitted, an Organization Profile will be visible to administrators for review.
A pro tip from our Implementation team: If you keep this step optional for your applicants, we recommend including an Eligibility Form in your application process. Eligibility Forms are still an important tool that you can leverage to help you verify that the applicant meets your program requirements after they have submitted their unique ID.
Accessing Organization Profiles
Program administrators can access Organization Profiles from multiple locations across the Submittable platform.
- New top navigation: Easily review all the organizations and businesses that have a corresponding Organization Profile by clicking on the top ‘Organizations’ menu option. From here, you can easily click through an alphabetized list of the businesses and organizations captured, or simply search for the desired entity using the Search function.
- Submission List & Submission Details view: Access individual Organization Profiles by clicking on the business or organization’s name, via the ‘View’ hyperlink (when available).
- Funds tab: While checking out existing Transactions, easily navigate back to the corresponding business or organization by clicking on the ‘View’ hyperlink under the Organization’s column (when available).
Managing Organization Profiles
Organization Profiles are also purpose-built to scale with your program’s mission, year after year. Here’s how:
- Create Custom Fields for better data management and integrations: Custom Fields give you the ability to modify an Organization Profile to fit your own needs. If you need to document critical internal data points (like mission statements or the name of an executive director) you can add a Custom Field for each. You can also use Custom Fields to set end-points for creating automations and integrations with your existing tech-stack (e.g., accounting and funds distribution fields, human resources fields etc.).
- Autonomously manage application to organization mapping: Administrators can change, add, or re-link applications with the correct organization at any time on their own after an Initial Application has been received.
A pro tip from our Implementation team: From churn, changes in management, and even delegation of a key stakeholder, changes in application ownership are bound to happen. To support your change management needs, administrators and applicants can now Transfer Submission Ownership at any time. Once an application has been transferred from one owner to a new owner, the receiving application owner will instantaneously be reflected within the Organization Profile. Learn more about this workflow with our new Help Article.
Reporting on Organization Profiles
All Organization Profile data is readily available in Standard and Advanced Reporting tools. The information captured from third-party data sources, your applicants’ submissions, and even your Custom Fields will appear instantaneously in your reports.
Even better, you can clean up old data fields (like archiving outdated Custom Fields) for a better administrative experience. Even after auditing outdated Custom Fields, the data collected will always continue to appear in your reporting tools to help you remain audit ready.
Built for applicants, too
Just like you, we’re laser-focused on making sure applicants have a great experience using Submittable. Using the Organization Search function streamlines their experience, as well as yours. Applicants benefit from:
- Reduced manual entry and human errors: An easy search functionality allows you to identify an applicant’s affiliated organization or business, and capture relevant entity data from third party sources.
- Improved application clarity: Provides applicants with continued validation of who they are applying on behalf of throughout a program’s lifecycle.
As always, contact your Customer Success team with any questions. Thanks for tuning in!
Sam is Submittable's Product Marketer focused on Foundations, Non-Profits, and organizations that distribute grants or awards. She is passionate about helping organizations of any size to measure their impact and scale their programs with the platform. When not at work you can catch her in the mountains of Montana with her golden retrievers.