The University is in the process of converting paper forms which must be downloaded, printed and filled out by incoming students into online e-forms.

The Office of First Year and Transfer Programs (FYTP) at Syracuse University helps new students navigate the challenging first few months on campus. Among other things, FYTP helps students find and gain access to services such as Healthcare Enrollment, Accommodations, Disability Services, Tutoring etc.

Many of these services require students to download, print and manually fill out paper forms. FYTP saw an opportunity to reduce costs in a time of reduced budgets while simultaneously providing a better experience to students.

Challenges

• Already overwhelmed students had to fill out paper forms and remember to hand-deliver/fax them in.
• FYTP staff manually processed forms that were often unreadable or contained errors.
• Hand-coding each form required expensive ITS staff. Further, there were often situations where forms needed to be put up quickly, and used for a short period of time.
• The confidentiality of student data had to be assured.

So why frevvo

• Syracuse had successfully used frevvo in their Food Services Department where business users were creating short-lived online surveys.
• The Forms Designer is easy to use by non-programmers dramatically reducing the demands on ITS staff.
• The forms enforce data validation, required fields and skip logic thereby eliminating errors.
• Since the form is submitted instantly, there was one less thing for students to remember to do.
• FYTP manual processing is dramatically reduced and simplified.

The Results

FYTP is able to deliver online forms on demand at dramatically reduced cost while simultaneously reducing the burden on new students who already have enough on their minds.