2023 in review: A year of powering progress

Our purpose is to accelerate mission-driven work. In other words, our mission is to accelerate yours—to power your progress, whatever your social good aim may be.

Thousands of organizations across sectors have used Submittable for over a decade. Over that time, our customers have shown us what they need in order to do their best work. We've identified these key pillars for fulfilling their needs:

State, local, federal, and tribal governments use Submittable for end-to-end management for grants, funding programs, and application processes, including fraud prevention, funds disbursement, and compliance.

Nonprofits and foundations use Submittable to power social impact programs like grants, awards, and scholarships, supporting every stakeholder from start to finish.

Businesses small and large use Submittable’s full CSR suite spanning employee engagement tools for volunteering, giving, and matching, as well as community grants.

We’re so proud of the role our products play in making this good work possible. And as the sector evolves, we’re continuing to innovate, so that our customers can stay at the forefront of social good.

The most meaningful feedback we get about our product is from our customers. But we’re also delighted to have received quite a few accolades from industry experts in 2023.

Submittable Product Recognition in 2023

• APPEALIE SaaS and Software Awards Overall SaaS Award winner in the Vertical Industry category for Enterprise 

• Capterra Shortlist for Grant Management Software

• Software Advice Front Runners 2023 Top Grant Management Software 

• GetApp Category Leader for Grant Management Software

• Finovate Award for Best Fintech Award for Minnesota Frontline Worker Pay Program in partnership with US Bank

Jump ahead to Chapter 5 of this report to learn more about how our product evolved in 2023 and what our customers have to say about it.

In 2023, we announced our strategic partnership with Microsoft. As a Microsoft Tech for Social Impact recommended partner, we’ll collaborate to better serve the social good sector with new technology. 

Here’s what this partnership means for Submittable customers:

• We’re powered by and optimized for Microsoft. This means we’re hosted on Microsoft Azure, leveraging Azure OpenAI Service, and we’re aligned with Microsoft Common Data Model and Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit.

• We’re advancing AI for good. We’re actively developing AI powered tools to provide value to every stakeholder in the grant management lifecycle. Read more about our Responsible AI principles and the first AI-powered features coming to customers soon in Chapter 5: Evolving to accelerate the future of mission-driven work. 

Submittable also partners with a wide array of other businesses to ensure that we serve our customers with the services they need.

Everyone at Submittable cares deeply about living our corporate values. Here’s what that looked like in 2023.

Another part of walking the walk is through our direct support of nonprofits doing good work in our communities. As we often recommend to our customers and community, we took a trust-based approach, offering a total of $25,000 in unrestricted funds to support these fantastic nonprofits near our offices in Missoula, MT and Bellevue, WA.

We continued our corporate volunteer program, launching one event per month for each of our office locations, performing tasks from trail maintenance to creating spring break activity kits to support our communities. Together, we logged over 200 hours giving back. 

We also launched our first year of employee donations and corporate matching on our own Give product. 

Our employees spearheaded a giving campaign to support Maui fire relief. With a corporate match of $10,000, we raised $22,000 in just 72 hours to Maui United Way and Hawaii Community Foundation (as recommended to us by a local customer), each providing essential services on the ground to impacted people. 

We were also thrilled to increase the impact of our community grants through a reverse match program. On Giving Tuesday, our employees were invited to participate, making direct donations and deepening our support of our nonprofit partners.

Learn more about Submittable’s 2023 Community Grant Recipients

On September 4, Michael Fitzgerald, one of Submittable’s co-founders and our former CEO for ten years, passed away. 

Michael was a novelist, software engineer, and tech trailblazer. He was creative, sharp, and gritty—a self-described “show up and do shit person”, who approached his work with vulnerability and tenacity. We miss his humor, his passion, and his quirks, and are grateful every day for the company he created and believed in.

To honor his legacy in one small way, we established a grant to invest in the arts in the Missoula community—a space where Michael was a beloved and influential member. We were thrilled to issue the first grant to the Missoula Writing Collaborative. 

Michael lived with Stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer for six years. He was open about his diagnosis in hopes it might spark others to get colonoscopies. He observed, “It seems to me that there is a stigma attached to colorectal cancer because it involves unsexy body parts like our colon or rectum, plus lots of talk around stools. But being shy about it, has, in my opinion, gotten a lot of people unnecessarily killed."

So also in his honor, we’d like to remind you, in his words: 

Thanks for building something special, Michael.