Submittable improves authentication flows and user satisfaction with Forms

Unifying an uneven Identity experience

Submittable is a social impact platform that serves businesses, nonprofits, and the public sector. Its clients (and their end-users) use Submittable for everything from grant management to volunteer engagement. However, the platform’s Identity experience was inconsistent from app to app. Because of this disjointed architecture, Submittable’s developer team struggled to implement account linking, and security features like monitoring, alerts, and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) across all apps. Every app also required built-in localization for over 30 languages and Single Sign-On (SSO) support to reduce onboarding times.

Initially, the Submittable team tried to solve Identity issues with a homegrown solution that was complex and time consuming. Instead, Submittable sought an Identity partner that would help their developers save time, improve the signup and login experience for their audiences, and protect users with best-in-class security features.

Improving developer efficiency with no-code implementation

Submittable evaluated external providers that could manage Identity for their 17 million users, while empowering their developers to work more efficiently. The team chose Okta Customer Identity Cloud (CIC) because it offered out-of-the-box solutions for SSO, language support, and monitoring and alerting capabilities. Submittable’s developers can now focus on providing value to customers, rather than maintaining Identity. 

With its quick migration speed and simplified no-code functionalities for customizing Identity flows via Forms, Okta CIC allowed Submittable’s team to bypass the time-consuming workarounds they needed for their previous solution. The Submittable team now has the freedom to easily customize authentication with features such as account linking and MFA, providing a unified Identity experience across apps for all of their users.

Consistent and secure account linking with Forms

Forms enables Submittable’s team to easily link accounts, giving clients — and their applicants and employees — a seamless Universal Login experience. Additionally, Forms helps protect Submittable’s infrastructure because it eliminates the need to redirect off of the login page for custom experiences. This protection is extended further for customers that opt into MFA via Okta CIC. Forms also simplifies development work with a simple, drag-and-drop, no-code interface. With Forms, it only took six hours for a developer to get the new account linking flow up and running — an 85% efficiency improvement compared to the 40 hours spent setting up the flow with Okta CIC and Actions. The usability of Forms also meant the time spent maintaining the account linking flow was reduced from 10 hours a year to less than one hour annually, resulting in 90% time saved. This ease of use led to an overall 50% improvement in authentication-related operations relative to Submittable’s previous homegrown solution.

The flexibility of Okta CIC is integral for meeting the demands of Submittable’s customer base. With Forms, developers can now quickly and easily customize Identity flows to suit specific needs without heavy time investments, giving the team opportunities to iterate quickly. Submittable plans to create consent pop-ups for cookies or terms of service, as well as employee engagement tools for personalized data collection using Forms. By letting Okta handle Identity, Submittable can now focus on delivering better social impact products for its clients and their end-users over a unified platform.

About Submittable

Submittable is a social impact platform that makes it simple to launch, manage, and measure the results of grant, community investment, and employee engagement programs. They’ve helped thousands of organizations worldwide run more than 145,000 programs and collect over 25 million applications, saving time and money in the process.