Success Story

Industry

Higher Ed

The University of Michigan Uses Feature-Rich Forms to Improve Communication

3

Campuses on a single platform

15

Departments using Salesforce-integrated web forms

Overview

The University of Michigan’s Center for Educational Outreach and departments on three campuses use FormAssembly for a variety of uses from building surveys, to event registration forms, and even a faculty feedback form. Here’s the story of why they chose FormAssembly, how they use it, and why it’s right for their higher education institution.

Lack of Coordination Across Campuses

Challenge

The Center’s work involves coordinating with internal and external groups to ensure that events and services go smoothly. As they pursued ways to be more effective, staff sought a way to simplify communication across campuses.

“We have several projects where we needed to be able to connect to Salesforce and prefill forms and distribute those unique links to folks across campus. We didn’t want a platform where we had to create yet another database where people have to log-in to access the information that we need them to update,” Skoczylas said.

“We have access to Google Forms, we have access to Qualtrics, but none of these are flexible enough to meet the number of use cases we put to these tools. FormAssembly is dynamic given that we can do major building and process automation.”

Adam Skoczylas

Program Manager for the Center for Educational Outreach

Easy Integration and Feature-Rich Forms

Solution

Across University of Michigan’s three campuses, there are four separate FormAssembly implementations used by 15 total units. This widespread use showcases the ability FormAssembly users have to make the solution fit their needs.

Skoczylas said he loves how flexible and feature-rich FormAssembly is and how it’s capable of handling both internal and external use cases throughout the school.

In addition to being flexible in terms of use cases, Gould said FormAssembly is easy to use and allows multiple people to get up to speed quickly.

“I like that it’s user-friendly. We’ve had groups come in where we’ve provided very little training, and they’re able to get their forms up and running.” Gould said. “That’s one of the things about higher education that’s really important. Especially in a decentralized environment, you want people to have some kind of ownership over a piece of the process, and this is an easy thing that they can own with minimal oversight from an administrator.”

Features that University of Michigan uses

Google Sheets integration

The Center for Educational Outreach also takes advantage of FormAssembly’s Google integration with forms that manage payment requests from different university offices.

“Our business office staff are able to share and collaborate in Google Sheets and track that information, but the information is getting pushed there through FormAssembly,” Skoczylas said.

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Survey building

“It used to be paper forms for about 80 faculty members between two schools, and they basically had a 10-12 page form to fill out. It was an administrative nightmare for the groups pulling it together, but it also didn’t offer a very nice user experience for one of the more vocal and important groups on campus, the faculty group. So, we’re out to solve those two issues and also allow for reporting, which will be the first time they’ll be able to do anything on the aggregate level since gathering that data.”

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Salesforce Integration

“Before FormAssembly, we were collecting data with another tool and every activity was a new row in a spreadsheet,” Skoczylas said. “By being able to connect Salesforce, we’re able to track and link those diversity activities with individuals in the university’s HR database. Then we have connections to what department folks work for.”

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What’s next?

Since implementing their original use cases, the Center for Educational Outreach has also designed an award-winning form process for their Children on Campus Registry. The improved registry process fosters cross-campus collaboration and promotes transparency through better risk management. The university continues to run new pilot projects featuring FormAssembly as a means to optimize data collection.

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