San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Modernizes Data Collection with FormAssembly

The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) , a California local government agency, provides water, power and sewer for 2.6 million customers in the city of San Francisco, in addition to providing San Francisco’s municipal department with green sources of energy, including hydroelectricity and solar power. As an organization they aim to provide high-quality services to their customers and keep their community educated and informed.

FormAssembly Solution: Salesforce Connection, Modern Forms, Low-Maintenance Functionality

The SFPUC, a mutual customer of ours and our partner Bluewolf, started using FormAssembly in the spring of 2016. Key selling points for the SFPUC were FormAssembly’s strong integration with Salesforce, the attractive, modern form design possibilities, and the many different options and examples of how they could use forms to better their organization.

Florencia Prada, the SFPUC’s Technology and Social Media Manager, told us that one of her favorite parts of using FormAssembly is how low-maintenance, yet reliable the system is.

“I like that I don’t have to go and check it all the time,” Florencia said. “If I want to learn more I can, otherwise it will be there when I need it, and it will be working. It’s working constantly.”

This ease-of-use comes in handy to the SFPUC as they use FormAssembly to power nearly all the forms on their website, including newsletter subscriptions, event request forms and more.

Use Case: Newsletter Subscriptions

The SFPUC uses FormAssembly to collect newsletter subscriptions that are transferred directly to Salesforce. According to Florencia, before FormAssembly, the SFPUC regularly received large amounts of fake email list signups, which clogged up their email list with useless information that wasn’t from the people they were trying to reach.

Since implementing a FormAssembly form with a CAPTCHA, the SFPUC has seen a huge reduction in the number of fake signups. With this small, yet significant change, their database of newsletter subscribers is cleaner and more accurate than ever.

Use Case: Event Requests

The SFPUC also uses FormAssembly as a way for the public to request presence at different events throughout the city. These events, which may include neighborhood association gatherings and other functions, are a way for SFPUC to talk about the services they provide and educate the local community.

FormAssembly helps out by providing a streamlined way to collect and connect all that information. The form that collects these requests serves as an critical bridge between the SFPUC and the groups that want to contact them.

“This is pretty important,” Florencia said. “If we don’t have an easy way for people to do that, it makes our job a little more difficult. Having FormAssembly helps avoid requests falling through the cracks.”

Use Case: Gauging Interest & Sharing Information for Women Interested in Construction Trades

SFPUC uses FormAssembly to collect information from women ages 18 to 44 who are interested in learning more about how to start a career in the construction field.

“It’s another way to spread the word about the work that we do,” Florencia said.

Having a form solution that can be used to quickly create forms and collect information on the fly is helpful to measuring the impact of a program like this.

“In a way, the form is validating interest, reach and impact,” Florencia said.

FormAssembly Offers User-Friendly Forms and a Streamlined, Centralized Form Tool

Florencia said the SFPUC likes being able to use one tool for so many different purposes, from newsletter signups to request-for-information forms to event presence requests.

No matter the application, FormAssembly’s user-friendly forms provide the attractive interface that captures user information and transmits it to the systems the SFPUC uses.

Pre-FormAssembly, Florencia said the SFPUC didn’t have one centralized way of gathering the different types of information they collect. The result of this was processes that were more confusing and disjointed than they had to be.

“Before, it was a little bit all over the place,” she said.

Since they adopted FormAssembly, that issue has been remedied, and they’re now able to easily collect legitimate information and keep it in a central location that anyone who needs to can access.

“It’s stored in one place. It’s all available through the system, and of course it’s in Salesforce as well,” Florencia said. “Data doesn’t live with one person.”

————————————–

A big thanks to the SFPUC and to Florencia Prada for sharing the story of how they use FormAssembly to make business run more smoothly at their organization! If you’re interested in learning how FormAssembly is used for other business processes and in other industries, check out the other case studies on our site.

As always, you can test out any potential use cases for your business with a free, two-week trial. Start your trial today!