2025: Our Year in Review

And that’s a wrap on 2025! Now maybe it’s just me, but I admit I feel quite ready to turn the page on a year that was often extremely challenging, for so many, in so many ways.

Difficulties notwithstanding, reflecting back, there is so much good and important work to recognize in the Submittable customer community. Together, in 2025, this Submittable community:

• Offered 28,931 programs

• Welcomed 1,184,594 applicants

• Conducted 4,418,785 reviews

• Managed $4,372,384,874 in funds 

It all makes a big impact for people next door and around the world—from fighting poverty, to critical scientific research, to supporting environmental resiliency for future generations. Here’s a snapshot of some of the customer programs we highlighted in 2025:

• The City of Inglewood delivered $2.3 million to 4,730 Inglewood residents in a first-of-its-kind property tax relief program launched in less than a single month. Read the story. 

• Meta nurtured aspiring and established Black and LatinX creators by providing opportunities for content, education, and community through their We the Culture and Dale Tú programs. Read the story. 

• A State Department of Education saved thousands of hours while creating a more accessible experience for low-income students, resulting in a 66% increase in applications for scholarships. Read the story

(We’d love to share the story of your good work, too—tell us about your program here.) 

Thank you for inspiring us everyday with your commitment to improving our world, one program at a time. We are honored to help power your impact. 

Read on for more of our 2025 recap.

Evolving our product

It was a year of evolution for our product as well. We know this is a big reason customers stay with us year after year—because you know that as your program evolves, we’re evolving with you. As some of you put it in our recent survey:

“I appreciate the consistent upgrades to the platform, so we don't feel like we are ‘'"stuck’'" with a solution that isn't moving forward with our needs.”

Grants and Operations Manager at private foundation

“Submittable is continually making updates to the platform to make it function even better.”

Funding & Cultural Programs Manager in city government 

“[T]here are new features that are being rolled out routinely to improve and enhance the user experience.”

Program Director at a Nonprofit 

We agree—improvements to the product over time are an important part of our commitment to you. Here are the highlights of product upgrades for 2025:

Super Simple Reimbursements to Make your Life Easier

Our Funds Management module now delivers end-to-end reimbursement management:

• Simplified requests for grantees: Grantees submit requests directly from their awards, with built-in budget validation and receipt requirement

• Smart approval workflows: Assign specific approvers and track every decision with full audit trails.

• Real-time financial visibility: See exactly how funds are being used across awards and budget categories as it happens, plus track how much you have left in each category.

Improved Funds Management with New Tracking Tools

The following updates are available now to customers with Funds Tracking (with the exception of those using Funds Distribution). 

• Restrict Projects to specific Funds: To avoid mistakes and streamline management, you can now restrict the Funds available per Project. 

• Apply statuses and dates to individual Award payments: When making a payment, you can now apply a status (Pending, Processing, Disbursing, and Paid) as well as a date (future or past). 

• Visualizations and drill-down Award details: Within the Awards tab to the right of an application, you can now see handy visualizations of awarded and paid funds. You can also dive deeper by selecting View Award Details to see a transaction log and larger bar graph of the chosen award.

• Automatic payment identifiers for improved internal tracking: Each payment now has an automatic identifier associated with it which you can use for internal purposes.

Docusign Tracking Visibility and Executed Documents

We’re thrilled to share that with this latest release, we’ve delivered the two biggest requests for enhancements to our Docusign integration. The best part is, both of them keep you right in Submittable! You’ll now benefit from:

• Full visibility into signer history: Track your document's journey from send to signature without leaving Submittable.

• Access to executed documents: Once everyone's signed on the dotted line, you can download the fully executed document directly from your submission—no more platform hopping required.

The key to this update is that now, rather than just sending information from Submittable to Docusign, we are also receiving information from Docusign and making it available in Submittable.

Custom Roles with Granular Permissions

We released Custom Roles to our pilot customer group, and will be rolling it out to our full customer base soon! Custom Roles will bring Submittable customers: 

• A new dedicated Role Admin: There will be a new permission set called a "Role Admin". Only Role Admins will be able to create and assign custom roles.

• Granular permissions to choose from: When creating a new custom role, Role Admins can either begin with an existing role (Level 1-5 or custom) and then edit permissions, or create a new role from scratch.

You'll be able to create roles like:

• Reviewer roles with additional access, including the ability to update Internal Forms, view awards, view all submissions, and/or access to search, filter or reports

• Administrator roles for program set up only with no submissions management, and/or the inverse

• Finance roles with full access to funds and reporting only

• Read-only roles with full access to view, but not change, all data

See our new features in action

Catch our full round up of feature releases from 2025, plus live instructions on how to create your dream Custom Role, at Submittable Wrapped. Register now to join us January 22. 

Our partnership with Scholarship America

In the fall, we were proud to be the chosen technology partner of Scholarship America, thanks to our end-to-end, flexible, and easy-to-use platform that offers fantastic applicant experiences alongside comprehensive reporting. 

Since 1958, Scholarship America has distributed $5.7 billion in academic support to 3.4 million students across the United States. This partnership makes unparalleled scholarship management services as well as scholarship marketing services available to existing Submittable customers. 

A new look for a bigger future

For the first time in many years, we updated our logo!

The new logo—an S that replaces the submission icon of yore—is a reflection of the journey we've been on as a company, far beyond the submission management of our founding 15 years ago (though we’re still great for that!). The interlocking lines in the S symbolize our relationship with all of you—our partnership and how together, we create something greater than we could alone. 

The new logo accompanies a refreshed color palette and other visual updates to reflect our brand as we are today—modern, innovative, and always grounded in how we can best support the important work of our customers. We're excited about this milestone and how it sets us up for the next stage of growth for the company, hope you are, too.

Walking the walk

Our driving purpose at Submittable is to provide technology that accelerates the good work of our customers. We also strive to show up as a company in a way that reflects our values.

This year, we provided a $250 corporate match to all employees to donate to the nonprofit of their choice through our top-rated corporate giving platform. We also honored the legacy of Submittable co-founder and former CEO, Michael Fitzgerald, with a grant to Giving Art to Missoula, a nonprofit in our Montana headquarters that makes art supplies available to all, for free. 

We continued our practice of elevating the voices of those in our industry who inspire and challenge us, and you, to work smarter and more intentionally. This year, some highlights from our podcast, Impact Audio, included a conversations with: 

• David Callahan, founder and editor in chief of Inside Philanthropy, covering the rise of megadonors and their impact on the world of philanthropy

• Kelly Fitzsimmons, founder and CEO of Project Evident, and Sarah Di Troia, CIO, discussing the possibilities AI is opening up for the social sector

• Matthew Hanson, managing director of grants and policy at Witt O’Brien's, shedding light on how government grantmakers have pivoted under the Trump administration 

We also published a comprehensive hub of resources for government grantmakers, as well as a report on the state of the nonprofit sector, designed to share strategies of resilience from peer to peer. 

If you haven’t already, we invite you to engage with our resources. The best way to stay in the know is to subscribe to The Review, the newsletter penned by our VP of Social Impact, Sam Caplan, where he drops new episodes of Impact Audio and shares tactical advice alongside inspiration and wisdom from people on the front lines of social change. 

Let’s go, 2026

They say that there’s no growth without hardship. As you buckle down and prepare to meet the new year toughened, a little wiser, and certainly more resilient, we are right there with you. Thank you again for your trust and partnership. We look forward to achieving even bigger and better things together next year. So let’s go, 2026—we’re ready to make it a great one.