Collaborative applications are how most award and grant submissions actually get written — a lead author drafts, a finance colleague handles the budget, a supervisor signs off. Until now the software has pretended otherwise, and the work has happened in email attachments named budget_v4_FINAL_revised.xlsx.
Co-Apply replaces that chain with one live workspace. Invite colleagues, mentors or clients into a submission and edit it side by side, with presence, live field updates and a shared submit button.
On this page
- Why collaborative applications needed solving
- How Co-Apply works
- Sharing without accounts
- The decisions behind it
- Availability
Why collaborative applications needed solving
Watch how a team-authored submission is assembled today and the pattern is consistent. Someone downloads a template, fills their section, emails it on. Someone else edits a copy. A third person’s changes arrive after the second person has already worked from an older version. Close to the deadline, one person reconciles everything by hand and pastes the result into the portal.
Every step is an opportunity to lose work, and the reconciliation happens under time pressure by whoever is least able to refuse. The submitted application is frequently not the best version anyone wrote — it is the version that survived the merge.
This is sharpest in grant applications, where the split between narrative and budget almost guarantees multiple authors — a structural difference we set out in grant management vs award management. But it shows up in any award entry where a submission needs sign-off before it goes.
How Co-Apply works
Open a submission and you see everyone currently in it. When a collaborator focuses a field, it is outlined in their colour with their initials attached, so two people never unknowingly overwrite the same answer. Values appear as they are committed, and every change autosaves to the single shared application.
Project title
Budget narrative
Supporting documents
- Live presence — an avatar roster with a “3 viewing · Live” indicator, reconnecting automatically
- Field-level attribution — the field someone else is editing is outlined in their colour, initials attached
- Edit on pause, not per keystroke — updates land when a collaborator pauses typing, so the form never flickers
- Shared submit — when one collaborator submits the stage, everyone’s view updates
Sharing without accounts
Sharing works the way people already expect from Google Drive: generate a link, then choose anyone with the link or restrict it to named email addresses. Links carry an expiry and can be revoked in one click.
Invited collaborators do not need an existing account. They verify their email, join as a guest, and can upgrade to a full account later without losing their work. That last detail matters more than it sounds — the single most common reason a collaborator never contributes is being asked to create an account at the moment they were trying to help.
A note for programme administrators. Open sharing means applicant data reaches people the programme never registered. If your collection statement names who may see a submission, guest collaborators belong in that description. The restricted email allow-list exists for programmes that need collaboration bounded to named individuals.
The decisions behind it
Three choices shaped how this behaves, and each traded something away.
Updates on pause, not per keystroke
Character-by-character sync looks impressive in a demo and is unpleasant to work in — text shifting under your cursor while you compose. Changes commit when a collaborator pauses, so the form stays readable. The trade is a short delay before others see an edit; the field outline covers the gap by showing that someone is working there.
Field-level attribution rather than character-level merging
Character-level merge algorithms handle simultaneous edits to the same sentence elegantly. Application forms rarely need that — two people writing in one field at once is a coordination problem, not a merge problem. Attribution at field level solves the real failure, which is silent overwriting, without the complexity.
Guest access before account creation
Requiring accounts would give cleaner identity and a tidier audit record. It would also mean a supervisor asked to review a budget at 10pm gives up at the signup screen. Email verification is the compromise: enough to attribute a change, little enough to not deter the contribution.
Worth being explicit about what this does not change. Co-Apply governs how an application is written, not how it is assessed. Judge-side conflict handling, scoring and the audit trail described in our guide to the award judging process are unaffected, and collaborator identity on the applicant side is kept separate from judging records.
Availability
Co-Apply is available now to all AwardScience programmes. Administrators can enable or disable collaborative applications per programme, and restrict sharing to an email allow-list where the entry rules require a single named applicant.
If you are evaluating platforms, this is a reasonable thing to test in a trial rather than take on trust — alongside the questions in our RFP guide.
Book a live demo to see Co-Apply on your own programme, or review pricing.
