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This post was originally published in November 2024
In case you missed it, you can now build Custom Placeholder Tags within your Submittable account! Read on to learn more and catch a few of our favorite Custom Placeholder Tags that you’ll want to try out ASAP!
What’s a Placeholder Tag?
Placeholder Tags are dynamic fields that Level 4 and 5 users can use to automatically insert an applicant’s submitted information into messages, emails, and response templates.
Within your Submittable account, you can choose from two different types of Placeholder Tags:
Standard Placeholder Tags: These are out-of-the-box Placeholder Tags that are built into your account, featuring information that’s always available, like the submitter name or your organization’s name. You can review the full list of available Standard Placeholder Tags here.
NEW! Custom Placeholder Tags: Just like the name implies, administrators can create Placeholder Tags that are unique to their own organization, down to specific details that are crucial to each of your programs. Custom Placeholder Tags can be mapped to most form fields on your organization’s Internal, Eligibility, and Initial Forms. Learn more about Custom Placeholder Tags with this new Help Article, or simply navigate to More>Configurations>Custom Tags to try it out now.
BONUS: Do you use Docusign to create and send grant agreements? Any Custom Placeholder Tag that you create can be synced with your Docusign account, which means your team can get customized agreements out the door faster than ever before. If you’re interested in setting up this capability, contact your Customer Success team to get started!
Custom Placeholder Tags in Action
Looking for some inspiration on how to get started? Check out these favorite Custom Placeholder Tags that your trusty Submittable Implementation team and fellow community of Submittable users have seen some major time savings from:
- Use personalization that matters: From nicknames, to preferred pronouns, and any other sort of personal identity information, create Tags that help you to genuinely connect with each of your applicants based on their personal preferences.
- Improve prompts for progress reports and impact requests: Create Tags from data captured in an Initial application to simplify how you ask applicants to provide updates against their originally stated goals or outcomes.
- Reformat how you ask for additional information: Creating Tags from key Form Fields in your Eligibility and Initial form types can help you to ‘repeat’ an applicant’s response when requesting additional information about a specific question, which could help to eliminate tedious back and forth conversations.
- Provide clarity in declination communications: Give your applicant a clear response of why they are not the awarded grantee for your program. Create a Tag for crucial data that can help you to provide additional details about those qualifications that they fell short of.
- Strengthen grant agreements: Especially for those using Submittable’s integration with Docusign, crucial data captured in Initial Forms can be turned into Tags that help to support negotiations, commitments to goals, and more in binding agreements between administrators and applicants.
- Amplify stakeholder visibility: From site visit notes to progress report analyses that are kept on Internal Forms, now you can provide your greater team of stakeholders with grantee updates by creating Tags that highlight your reflections and report notes.
So get creative, and try out Custom Placeholder Tags for yourself! We can’t wait to hear what you come up with.
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.