★★★★★
“Sessionboard has been one of our most successful investments this year, making our team more efficient and allowing us to focus on the most critical components of our events.”
Submittable handles application intake and review for grants and awards across industries.
Submittable — their scope
Program, CRM & marketing
Submittable is a submission and review platform for grants, fellowships, and awards programs. Sessionboard Awards targets associations where winners join conference faculty, judges serve across cycles, and marketing needs Advocacy with attribution — not a submission export. Submittable fits horizontal grants intake; Sessionboard fits event-native program graphs.
Match your role to the job Sessionboard solves — program ops, content reuse, or marketing attribution.
Submittable closes the review cycle — winners re-entered manually into conference systems.
Fellowship recipients should present — one faculty record from award acceptance to speaker portal.
Winner announcements without tracked registration links — Advocacy belongs on the program graph.
Abstract authors and award nominees are the same people — CRM should not reset per program.
“Sessionboard has been one of our most successful investments this year, making our team more efficient and allowing us to focus on the most critical components of our events.”
“Sessionboard saves significant planning time and makes it easier than ever for speakers and sponsors to participate in our clients' events.”
“We used Sessionboard daily. It served as our source of truth for tracking speakers, sending emails, and accessing reports. The ability to set a weekly digest email was a huge time saver.”
“Honestly, I loved it! Getting everything out of the spreadsheet. It collects all the information and gives you a visual of who you might want to invite.”
What Submittable is strong at, and what Sessionboard adds for program, speakers, and content.
Grants, fellowships, and awards across nonprofit and corporate use cases.
Configurable forms and review stages for varied programs.
Built for standalone submissions, so it fits only when no conference program ties to outcomes.
Nominees, judges, winners, and session faculty on one graph — year over year.
Call for papers and awards share review patterns and faculty database.
Ceremony sessions, clips, and tracked winner promotion on session records.
Program, speaker CRM, content — plus Advocacy and Dispatch marketing tools competitors treat as afterthoughts.
Call for papers (CFP), multi-round review, chair workflows, conflict of interest (COI) tracking, and published agenda — work competitors leave in spreadsheets.
One faculty record: portal, bio, materials, and communications across years — not a fresh CSV every submission cycle.
Live transcription, Media Library, clips, Attendee Hub, and Create on the session record you already manage.
Peer shares from speakers, sponsors, and faculty — tracked links to registration when sessions are accepted or confirmed.
Internal team distribution — automated share recipes for staff when content is ready, beside Hootsuite or Sprout for always-on social.
Event MCP
Sessionboard connects to the assistants your team already uses through MCP. Sessions, speakers, and committee data stay in Sessionboard — Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot read it live.
Which accepted speakers still haven’t submitted bios before we publish the app?
12 accepted speakers are missing bios. 4 also lack headshots. Top gaps: Dr. Rivera (keynote), Panel B moderators (2), Workshop track (3).
See how Sessionboard fits beside your existing stack.
What often stays on Submittable for now, and what Sessionboard usually runs.
Evaluating Sessionboard against Submittable for the program layer.
For event-linked awards and conference programs — yes. Unrelated grants shops may keep Submittable for horizontal intake.
Yes — pilot Sessionboard Awards on the meeting tied to your conference while other grants stay put.
Yes — rubrics and chair tools parallel abstract committee workflow on the same platform.
OpenWater and Submittable are forms engines; Sessionboard is the program graph for events — see our awards buyer guide.
Scoped to program volume — request a demo for a quote.
Talk through your event workflow — abstracts, speakers, content, and marketing on one program graph.
Evaluating Submittable for your awards program?
Request a demo