As a world-renowned academic and athletic institution, the University of Michigan needs little introduction. With approximately 50,000 students from all 50 states and 135 countries, the Ann Arbor-based university is recognized as one of the top-ranked public colleges in the United States.
Its Athletic department is also in a class of its own: With dozens of national championships and hundreds of Big Ten conference titles to its name, the University of Michigan’s sports program has been shaping the landscape of Division I collegiate athletics since the 19th century.
With such an established legacy, it’s no surprise that the University of Michigan Athletic department is essentially an entire organization unto itself, involving approximately 350 staff members and 940 student-athletes distributed across 27 different teams.
So what does operating such a complex and successful department entail? Well, besides the glamor of winning championships, it means a lot of paperwork behind the scenes.
Torri McCray, Business Systems Analyst for the University of Michigan Athletic department, is one of those people working diligently in the background to make it all happen from a process and administrative standpoint.
“What I like most about my job is the ability to problem-solve and find solutions to streamline processes within the Athletic department,” says McCray, who’s been at the University of Michigan for over a decade.
One of those solutions turned out to be Jotform Enterprise. In 2014, McCray set out to find a more robust alternative to Google Forms. She needed a powerful data-collection tool that she could get up and running quickly, but that also had advanced features like conditional logic. With Jotform Enterprise, McCray discovered all this and more.
We use pretty much everything in Jotform Enterprise . . . its versatility and ease of use is what sold us [on it]. Normally I’ll get a request and it literally takes me five minutes to create the form; even with more complex forms, it doesn’t take a long time to produce.
By now, McCray has created forms that touch every single department within Athletics, including Academics, Events, Team Management, HR, and more. But it was Jotform Enterprise’s versatility that enabled her to expand the way she implements it across the department — beyond just online forms — to optimize a variety of different functions and process flows. These uses include
- Tables to share and collaborate with others in her department
- PDF Editor to create receipts and invoices
- Smart PDF Forms for PDF conversion and conditional formatting
- White labeling to make custom-branded forms
- Autoresponder emails to automate email messages based on form submissions
- Multiuser capabilities and the Admin Console to allow other users within the department to create forms and manage different processes
- Jotform’s Authorize.net integration to process payments for stadium tours, facility rentals, banquets, and other sports-related events
This last use, specifically, was a major selling point; since August 2020, the university has processed over $700,000 in payments using Jotform Enterprise.
Jotform Enterprise has given us the ability to collect payments across the department, which was a huge thing for us. The university as a whole didn’t have a solution for that . . . it has saved us tons of money and time.
To be precise, McCray estimates that Jotform Enterprise has helped the University of Michigan save $40,000–$50,000 per year and hundreds of labor hours in administrative time.
In fact, Jotform Enterprise has been such a successful problem-solver for Athletics that McCray says other departments at the University of Michigan have reached out to get demos for it.
I’ve received an overwhelmingly positive response,” McCray goes on to say. “Jotform Enterprise has been a game changer for us.
At the time of writing, the University of Michigan has 20 users, more than 900 forms, and over 235,000 submissions attributed to its account. We’re thrilled that the Athletic department has been able to leverage Jotform Enterprise for its day-to-day operations, and to ultimately help the organization continue making an impact in the realm of collegiate sports and beyond.
Do you think your organization would enjoy benefits like multiple users under a shared account, single sign-on, a local data residency center, your own support team, and white labeling? Then Jotform Enterprise may be for you. To learn more or contact a member of our sales team, visit jotform.com/enterprise today.
Send Comment: