How to Automate Submittable

The open call is where a funder meets everyone it funds

Submittable is the platform a grant program runs on, from the day the call opens to the day the last report comes in. Foundations use it, so do corporate giving teams, government agencies, universities running scholarships and arts organisations running awards. Plenty of people met it first as a submission manager, the thing a literary magazine uses to take entries, and the shape is the same: a form goes out, work comes back, somebody decides.

What makes it the system of record is that the whole relationship passes through it. An applicant creates an account and never sees a spreadsheet. A reviewer reads inside it. Finance pays out of it. A year later the grantee's report lands in the same place the application did.

The people running it are rarely a large team. A program officer, an assistant, and a review committee assembled from staff, board members and outside experts who do this on top of their real jobs.

Between the deadline and the award, somebody is chasing

The form closes and the quiet part of the job starts.

An application arrives from an organisation nobody at the foundation has heard of, so somebody opens the state charity register to see whether it is in good standing, then a filing site to see what its last return says about its size. Another applicant lists a fiscal sponsor, which means checking the sponsor too. A reviewer has not opened their queue with three days left. The award is agreed, and now it needs a tax form, banking details and a signed agreement, each from a different person at the grantee.

Then the year after. Reports fall due on dates spread across the calendar, and each one takes a reminder, then a second reminder. Somebody is asked for a board summary of what the money actually did, and goes looking for evidence: the grantee's own site, a local news story, a photograph of the thing that got built.

Submittable

Eligibility confirmed against the public record Charity registration and the latest public filing checked for every applicant, so a lapsed status sits on the application before the committee meets.

Grantee reports chased before they are late Reports coming due listed with the grantee and the person who owes one, and a reminder drafted for each one still outstanding.

Impact evidence gathered, not remembered What each grantee has published about the funded work, collected as links against the grant it belongs to, ready for the board summary.

Eligibility screening and review rounds already carry the program

A program that has not configured all of this is doing work it does not have to do.

Eligibility screening runs before an applicant ever reaches the form, and can check tax-exempt status through Candid rather than taking the applicant's word for it. The form builder handles the form itself, with logic so an applicant sees only the questions that apply to them. Review is multi-stage: a screening pass, a scored round, a final round with a rubric, and assignments distributed to reviewers automatically by applicant type or reviewer specialty instead of by hand. Once a decision is made, funds distribution pays awardees from the same record, and post-award reporting and budget tracking follow the money after it leaves.

All of that operates on what the applicant typed into the form.

Whether the organisation's registration lapsed in March, what its most recent public filing shows, whether the county already funded the same project, whether the community centre ever opened: none of that is in the form, and no rule inside the platform can go and find it. The applicant asserts, and somebody with a browser confirms.

Due diligence can be finished before the committee meets

An organisation's filings and registrations are open to inspection on the day the application arrives.

Every applicant checked against the state charity register, with a lapsed or revoked registration flagged next to the application rather than found after a check has been cut. The most recent public filing read for each organisation, so a small grant heading to a very large budget is a discussion the committee chooses to have. Two applications from the same address under different names, put side by side.

The post-award side is the quieter half. Reports coming due in the next month, listed with the grantee and the person who owes one. Grantees who have been paid but have never filed, named before an auditor names them. And for the impact write-up, what the grantee has published themselves: the opening on their news page, the program on their calendar, the local coverage, gathered as links against the grant they belong to.

Nothing in that decides anything. Whether an application is funded, and for how much, is a judgement a committee makes and puts its name to.

Verification is clerical work, and funding is not

The week around a deadline goes on checking what applicants said against what the public record says, one application at a time.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens Submittable the way your program team does, reads the applications, the review stages and the report deadlines, then goes to the registries, the filing sites and the grantees' own pages and writes what each one says next to the application it belongs to.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and a run can be locked to an explicit list of domains. Decisions, declines, award letters and anything sent to an applicant or a grantee are drafted and wait for a person.

Each workflow below names the sites it opens.