Universidad Francisco de Vitoria’s productivity gets a boost

Using Jotform for data collection helps the Spanish university achieve scalable and sustainable results across departments

Universidad Francisco de Vitoria (UFV) is a private university located in metropolitan Madrid, Spain, with a student body of more than 12,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The university belongs to a network of Catholic training centers, colleges, and universities in several American and European countries.

UFV’s faculty and staff work to provide a comprehensive education for students. As part of that effort, staff realized they needed a form tool that was intuitive and easy to use but also had the conditional logic needed for the kind of complex data collection that accompanies post-class and conference surveys.

Sergio Travieso, the university’s director of digital evolution, first learned of Jotform at a previous job when researching data-collection tools on the market. He was drawn to Jotform’s clear user interface and easy drag-and-drop building tool.

“One of the reasons I decided on Jotform, apart from the possibility to create a much more complex form, was easy access to answer data, which, with the amount of submissions we have, really suited our needs. The amount of data we’ve collected has led to a significant increase in productivity, allowing us to better serve our students and to improve internal communication,” says Travieso.

By automating its educational data collection with Jotform Enterprise, UFV has eliminated paper waste, improving the organization’s sustainability. This has also freed up the time faculty and staff used to spend managing paperwork, so they can now focus on their core responsibilities.

How Universidad Francisco de Vitoria used Jotform to solve its data-collection challenges

Prior to working with Jotform, the university primarily collected data through its email system and copied stakeholders who needed to be notified. But collecting data this way created a situation where data was denormalized and needed to be properly formatted and processed later on.

In some cases, as a way to solve the formatting issue, faculty and staff would send a word processing or spreadsheet file to respondents to answer, but they would then have to do the same data management work on the back end.

Whether it was security, unstructured data challenges from email, or having to use multiple solutions to effectively manage the data, the operation was inefficient and unscalable.

Jotform Enterprise has replaced the days of email and manual work with powerful automation in an all-in-one, scalable solution. During the pandemic, the university has collected information about classes and exams through Jotform, helping professors and students continue the necessary work in their journey toward degrees.

UFV uses Jotform to collect data from teachers that’s not already contained in its CRM. By using Jotform’s integrations, data collected through forms is easily linked between databases.

The university also collects job applications, compiling the CVs of prospective teachers or employees. Since all form data is automatically synced in Jotform Tables, the PDFs of candidates’ actual CVs are available to stakeholders who have access to the table.

Administrative tasks that often take up time — like charting student attendance, registering faculty and staff for trainings or conferences, making facility reservations, and more — are now handled through time-saving online forms and a management database, allowing for the kind of streamlined department operations Travieso hoped for.

“Jotform has really meant a great increase in productivity, eliminating hundreds of papers and many hours of work,” he says.

The pandemic presented problems, but Jotform helped create solutions

The pandemic’s challenges to global education — from kindergarten to graduate school — have been well documented. The Universidad Francisco de Vitoria was no exception, but instead of letting things stall, the university used Jotform to find creative solutions.

Since the pandemic began, Spain has had mobility restrictions that prohibit movement except in the most essential circumstances. Faculty and students couldn’t get around town without a mobility certificate. In response, the university used Jotform as a database along with another tool (PowerAutomate), to provide more than 13,000 certificates so teachers and students could continue their work.

UFV also used Jotform to create an app that connects the university community directly with volunteer professionals (psychologists, life coaches, religious figures) to help students, staff, and faculty navigate feelings of anguish during the pandemic.

A big thank you to Universidad Francisco de Vitoria for sharing this story with us! If you’re an enterprise, educational institution, or government organization that would like to learn more about how Jotform Enterprise can help you, feel free to contact us.