Meet Submittable’s Additional Forms—the robust and flexible tool that collects information from your submitters at any point throughout the lifecycle of your program. Built to serve your mission from beginning to end, Additional Forms can help you streamline your program and minimize both administrative and reporting burdens on your applicants.
Additional Forms provide organizations with a scalable and integrated way to keep up with applicants throughout the term of their program. Key uses include:
- Gathering progress reports
- Multi-step application processes
- Collecting payment information
- Relationship-building and check ins
Administrators and key stakeholders can use Additional Forms to sustain strong relationships with their program beneficiaries while efficiently checking compliance boxes and serving their mission.
Read on to learn about the various capabilities of Submittable’s Additional Forms, and even gain a few time-saving tips along the way.
Building an Additional Form
Using Submittable’s signature drag-and-drop form builder, building an Additional Form is quick and easy. All the form fields that you’ve come to know (and love!) in Initial Forms are also available in Additional Forms. Here, you can also choose to Add Submission Fees, and even Enable Applicant Collaboration.
There’s no cap with Additional Forms—meaning you can create as many forms as you need for every project that you launch.
TIP: Launching a new program? Map out all the information you’ll need to collect from your applicants throughout the course of your program, and create Additional Forms in advance of launching your program. You’ll thank us later.
Implementing an additional form to your workflow
Once you’ve built your form, you’re ready to add it to your workflow. Depending on the purpose or lifecycle stage of your form, you can choose to send it to your applicants in a few different ways. For example, you may:
- Schedule out quarterly progress reports to each applicant per a particular program and include an associated deadline
- Request payment information for awardees following the acceptance of their applications
- Follow up with a subset of applicants to request more information as needed
Since you can send Additional Forms in bulk according to a variety of filters, or individually from the submission details page, you’ll always be able to send the right form, to the right recipients, at the right time. After selecting an individual or segment of applicants that should receive an Additional Form, you can save time by leveraging any of your pre-built email templates or choose to manually personalize individual emails before sending.
TIP: Set it, and leave it! Set your program to run on autopilot by choosing to schedule when an Additional Form needs to be sent, or set a deadline to stick to your desired timeline.
“We have a very small team so when our yearly application cycle closes, Submittable allows us to streamline the review process, gather reviewers’ responses, organize the information more easily, and present the information more clearly at meetings... I also find Submittable’s Additional Forms extremely useful, especially now that I am able to schedule sending the forms to grantees.“
(Anonymous, Foundation Professional)
Great applicant experiences
Year over year, we know your applicants are the cornerstone of your program. With this in mind, we’ve purpose-built Submittable to provide a seamless applicant experience for every individual that may submit to your program. Additional Forms are no exception. Some of the benefits of Additional Forms to applicants include tools that:
- Support an equitable and accessible experience. From our accessibility standards to form fields that allow over 70+ types of file uploads, applicants can efficiently submit their application in whatever way best fits their needs.
- Collaborate in real time with others when needed: Program managers can opt to enable applicant collaboration per each Additional Form. Collaboration opens the door to teams working remotely, and can also facilitate a more inclusive experience, in instances where the applicant may need assistance due to language, cognitive, or other barriers.
- Collect information, from the necessary applicants, only when you need it. Map out your program in advance to build each Additional Form before your program launches, and collect appropriate information as needed throughout the course of your program.This means you don’t need to overload your applicants with information requests at any one moment in time.
- Request, and manage, necessary information efficiently. There’s nothing worse than being asked to provide information that you’ve already provided. Once an Additional Form is sent to an applicant, the form automatically becomes associated with the Initial submission. That means, you only have to request information once, and the applicant will know that you respect their time, and that the information they provide is being stored and utilized appropriately.
Think of all of these tools as a win-win situation between you and your applicants–when your applicants are well set up to complete forms on their own terms, program managers are more likely to receive completed information in a timely and comprehensive manner.
TIP: Collaboration can be enabled from form to form, which puts program managers in a position to determine when collaboration should or shouldn’t occur throughout the lifecycle of a program. But rest easy—for security purposes, we’ve automatically removed the ability to collaborate on certain form fields such as Fraud Prevention, Social Security Numbers, and some Banking information.
The collaborative form feature is a really important feature for us since we have many instances where a team of people need to fill out an application or form together. We did not have this feature on any of our existing forms before Submittable.
Anonymous, Non-profit Individual
Simplified management tools
Let’s cut to the chase: managing Additional Forms is quick and easy. Additional Forms can be requested, managed, and reviewed from multiple access points across the platform, giving program managers and their review teams the opportunity to utilize them as necessary. By leveraging Additional Forms’ immense versatility, programs of any size can scale to meet the demands of their mission year after year.
With Submittable’s robust set of Filters, you can accomplish management tasks like:
- Reveal which Additional Forms of a specific program are past a noted deadline (or have a deadline coming up), and send those applicants a reminder email for completion
- Identify Additional Forms that have been scheduled to send at a later date, and adjust imminent dates as necessary
- Touch base with applicants that may have an Open for Editing form, and Close the Form for Editing as needed
How do I add additional forms to my account?
Additional Forms and their noted capabilities are offered as part of every current Submittable subscription plan. Additional Forms are uniquely constructed to help organizations of any size adequately serve their mission. See them in action in this video, then try it out for yourself in your own account.
Learn more about Submittable
Submittable simplifies and improves the processes you rely on to carry out your mission. Organizations big and small not only meet their goals with Submittable, but gain hours back in administrative time and minimize applicant burden in the process. To learn more about how Submittable could support your good work, contact us today. We can’t wait to learn about your program!
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.