AwardScience, the award and grant management platform, released live co-editing, single-fee team applications and mobile push notifications in the week of 3 August 2026. Team-authored submissions are the norm in grants and common in awards, and until this week the software pretended otherwise. A lead author drafted, a finance colleague did the budget, a supervisor signed off, and the coordination happened in attachments called budget_v4_FINAL_revised.xlsx.
This week replaced that chain with one live workspace. The full story behind the design — including why we lock a field rather than merge keystrokes — is in Co-Apply: real-time collaborative applications. What follows is what shipped alongside it.
On this page
- Live co-editing
- Team applications, charged once
- Imports match people who already exist
- Mobile push notifications
- Connect your own WhatsApp number
- Platform console with per-screen permissions
- Also in this release
- Availability
Live co-editing
Several people fill in the same application at the same time. You can see who is in the form, which field each person has open, and their text as it is committed. Every field saves automatically.
The failure this prevents is not a merge conflict — it is silent overwriting, where two people answer the same question and only one answer survives, with nobody told which.
Saved · just now
Application form › presence bar and field highlight
For IT teams. Authenticated socket rooms. A field is locked while someone edits it rather than merged after the fact, plus a save endpoint for single fields.
Team applications, charged once
Applicants invite teammates onto one shared application. Any member can submit it, and the submission fee is charged once per application rather than once per person.
Obvious in hindsight, and a real source of support tickets before: a three-person team being asked for three fees reads as a bug to them and as revenue to nobody.
Share “Coastal sensor network”
jordan@uni.example.eduEditor ✕
priya@lab.example.orgEditor ✕
Share dialog › people with access (current version)
For IT teams. Signed share tokens. Team scope is set on the server and never taken from the client. In week 4 this became the share dialog shown here.
Imports match people who already exist
When you import records, each row is matched to a registered user and you see who every application will belong to before anything is written. Accounts that do not yet exist can be created from a prefilled contact spreadsheet.
This is the step that decides whether a migration lands cleanly or produces 300 applications owned by the admin who ran the import.
Data migration to AwardScience
Bring an existing programme’s records into this flow — map the columns to this flow’s fields, then push the rows in.
Preview Applicant Attribution
286 out of 312 stage identities matched to registered users.
| Identity | Resolved User | Account Type | |
|---|---|---|---|
| j.tan@example.org | Jun Tan | Researcher | Matched |
| m.ortiz@example.org | Maria Ortiz | Researcher | Matched |
| k.obi@example.com | — | — | Admin (Fallback) |
Data migration › Preview Applicant Attribution
For IT teams. Identity resolution step before the write. Rows for stages the importer is not permitted to act on are rejected rather than reassigned.
Mobile push notifications
Any message template can now also be sent as a push notification to the AwardScience mobile app, either as the primary channel or as the fallback when another channel fails.
Results announcements are the obvious case. A push notification arrives on the lock screen at the moment the panel’s decision is released, which is the one message in the whole programme that nobody wants to find three days later.
The channel this template sends on. Content for other channels can still be written — it is used when they are the fallback.
Notification TitleTemplate editor › Push Notification channel, and the result on a phone
For IT teams. Firebase Cloud Messaging with stored device tokens. Content is per-language.
Connect your own WhatsApp number
Workspaces connect their own WhatsApp Business number through Meta’s sign-up flow, with no support ticket in between. The card shows whether the number can currently send as well as receive, and walks through PIN activation.
A number that can receive but not yet send is the single most confusing state in WhatsApp Business onboarding, so it is now stated on the card rather than discovered when a broadcast silently fails.
WhatsApp Business
Connect your WhatsApp number to message applicants.
What you need- Your organisation’s Facebook Business login
- A phone number not already used on WhatsApp
Settings › WhatsApp Business card
For IT teams. Meta Embedded Signup. Deauthorize and data-deletion callbacks are handled. Pro plan.
Platform console with per-screen permissions
AwardScience operators work in an admin console where each staff account reaches only the screens it has been granted. Unticked screens are hidden, and the server refuses their data as well.
This is an internal control rather than a customer-facing feature, and it is here because it is the control customers’ security reviewers ask about most often. The same principle applied to your own programme is covered in user groups and permissions.
Admins & Permissions
Accounts that can sign in to this console, and which screens each one can reach.
| Status | Screens | Last login | |
|---|---|---|---|
| ops-lead@example.com | Active | Super admin | Today |
| support@example.com | Active | Dashboard, WhatsApp Numbers | Yesterday |
| contractor@example.com | Suspended | No access yet | — |
Tick the screens this admin should reach. Unticked screens are hidden and their data is refused by the server.
Platform console › Admins & Permissions
For IT teams. Screen permissions are enforced server-side, not only in the interface.
Also in this release
Authorisation gaps were closed across analytics, webhooks and permissions, AI assistant output is now sanitised, and new database indexes went in.
Availability
Everything above shipped in the week of 3 August 2026 and is live now. Features marked Pro or Enterprise are noted as such in their technical notes; everything else is available on every plan.
If you are comparing platforms, these are reasonable things to test in a trial rather than take on trust — alongside the questions in our RFP guide.
Book a live demo to see any of this on your own programme, or review pricing.
