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Inviting Collaborators on Submissions and Additional Forms
Inviting Collaborators on Submissions and Additional Forms

Submittable's submitter collaboration tool enables groups of applicants to work together on submissions and additional forms.

Pam English avatar
Written by Pam English
Updated over a week ago

Submittable lets organizations choose if they want to allow their submitters to work on submissions together. If organizations allow this, you will see an option to Manage Collaborators:

Under Add More People, enter the email addresses of your collaborators. Enter those addresses (click Enter after each one), then click Invite.

Invited collaborators will receive an email letting them know you've invited them to collaborate on a draft submission using Submittable:

After you've sent invitations to collaborate, you can click on the Manage Collaborators link at any time to see the status of your invitations. In the row for each invitee who has not yet accepted their invitation, you will see Pending. There will also be a trash icon next to each person’s name so that the submission owner can remove anyone they no longer want collaborating on the submission.

The submission owner is always the person who sends the invitations and will be the only user who can submit the application after it is completed by the group. Collaborators will be able to contribute responses and save drafts at any time.

Action

Submission Owner

Collaborators

Save Drafts

Yes

Yes

Edit

Yes

Yes

Submit

Yes

No

Correspond with Organization

Yes

No

Once a collaborator clicks on the Get Started link in the invitation email, they will either be asked to create an account (if they do not have a Submittable account), be asked to sign in (if they already have a Submittable account), or be automatically signed in to their account (if they are already logged into Submittable in another tab).

After a collaborator has signed up/signed into Submittable, they can join the same form that the submission owner invited them to help complete. The collaborator will not be able to invite other collaborators. Invited collaborators will not see the Submit button since only the submission owner can submit a collaborative submission.

If multiple collaborators are on the form at the same time, they will see both page presence and field presence for each person.

Page presence is indicated by colored circles that contain users' initials and appear in the upper right area of the page, beneath the Manage Collaborators link:

Hovering over these icons will show the person’s full name and email address.

Field presence is indicated by a highlighted border around each field and shows that a person is actively editing that field. Their initials will appear in the upper right corner of the field as well:

As the submission owner and other collaborators start entering data into each field, each person who is a live user on the form will see the data appear immediately. 

If collaborators are working in the same field, the person who last enters any data will have their input saved. The exception to this is File Uploads. The person who first uploads a file determines which file remains uploaded to a submission. For another collaborator to replace an initially uploaded file, they must first delete what was uploaded, and then upload a new file. 

At any point in the collaboration process, the submission owner can click on either the Save Draft or Submit button at the bottom of the page. As with any submission, all required fields need to be properly completed before the submission owner can successfully submit.

A saved collaborative draft that is not yet submitted can be accessed by collaborators at any time by signing in to their Submittable account and clicking on the Collaborations tab in the submission list view:

The Submission owner will continue to see collaborations under the Saved Drafts tab. Submission owners will not see collaborations under the Collaborations tab.

After a collaborative submission is successfully submitted, notification of the successful submission will be sent to the submission owner and all collaborators. The submission owner will view the submission under their All Submissions tab. Collaborators will see the submission under the Collaborations tab in their accounts.

Note: Collaborative submissions can be opened for editing. Submission owners and collaborators can participate in the editing, but only submission owners can resubmit the form.





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