Submittable

Overall Opinion: Promising new talent needs funding to succeed, and grants allow those with money to provide the boost that hungry young artists and thinkers can use to share their vision with the world. But picking the most promising and visionary talent out of the vast pile of applicants can be like finding a needle in the haystack. For grant providers who want to make sure their money is used wisely, Submittable is a powerful tool for sifting through applicants and identifying the best places to target their grants. With Submittable, you'll never again have to worry about sorting through stacks and stacks of paper applications. They sort and order all the information for you so you can focus on the content of your applicants more than the administrative process. The core of the Submittable experience comes in the shape of the form creator. This allows you to create a streamlined and easily distributed application that you can use to reach out to a wide range of promising talent. Whether you're an editor looking for new writers, a non-profit looking to provide educators with the money they need for training, or a production studio trying to promote indie films, you have all the means to create applications that focus on your needs. The process of creating a form is simple. A drag and drop interface simulates most of the basic elements you'd find in CSS or JavaScript programming. You can create checklists and radio lists with ease, and the ability to add customized drop downs makes it easier for you to ultimately sort your applicants according to any number of criteria. There's also the ability to support file uploads that make it easy for your applicants to share their resumes with you as well as content like videos or visual art. Once you've built your form, sharing is easy. With a simple click of a button, you can publish your form to a custom URL and pollinate the link across all of your social media platforms. The ability to make forms private or public also allows you control of who has access to the application process. Once your applicants are in, the Submittable interface provides you with the tools to more effectively review them. A simply designed dashboard neatly orders all of your projects and applicants. Each of these can be assigned labels to more efficiently sort through them, and filters give you an even greater amount of control over what's presented on your dash. The ability to assign applicants to specific team members is a valuable tool for collaboration, but it's far from the only one. Five different permission levels give administrators complete control over who on their team has access to what information. Meanwhile, template responses allow you to send personalized rejection or acceptance letters via a variety of different forms of communication. Scoring criteria templates allow you to create a concrete set of terms by which to evaluate all of your applicants.

Pros: Great customization options for form creation High level of control over user access to applications Integrates smoothly with the mobile app

Cons: Hard to remove scores, making it difficult to recycle applicants for recurring grants Navigation is sometimes unintuitive