The Arbor Day Foundation is the largest nonprofit membership organization dedicated to planting trees, with more than 1 million members, supporters, and valued partners. As the organization celebrated 50 years and nearly 500 million trees planted, we reached out to web designer Rachel Fugate to learn how Jotform Enterprise supports the Arbor Day Foundation’s mission.
“We currently have 30 people using Jotform Enterprise,” said Fugate. “I manage the corporate account, which includes more than 265 forms, and set up new users with permissions using Jotform Enterprise’s Admin Console. We upgraded to Jotform Enterprise to automate data reporting and accommodate the thousands of submissions we were anticipating as the success of our membership campaigns grows.”
The Arbor Day Foundation’s current website creates some challenges for capturing form data at the scale needed. With these challenges, building forms and setting up relational databases require manual data pulls or building tools to generate routine reports.
As we grew, it became unsustainable to set up forms and manually pull the data. Our teams really appreciate how Jotform Enterprise gives them easy access to their data. They like the quick turnaround, and it’s much easier to build a form.
Rachel Fugate
In the past, gathering data could be a project that required three people’s time. Now users can style and format their forms, drag in the fields they want, and it’s done.
“Every time we needed a simple contact form, it was a big lift,” she said. “Being able to turn around forms quickly has been a huge improvement for us.”
Streamlining the form-building process with CSS customization
Fugate takes full advantage of the Jotform Enterprise’s white labeling and customizable CSS options.
I prefer Jotform Enterprise forms to our previous solutions because we can control how they look.
Rachel Fugate
“I created a boilerplate with all the CSS and primary form fields that I wanted, so anytime a form is requested, I can take off the fields I’m not using and add any additional styling at the bottom of the CSS file,” she said. “Everything’s consistent, the form matches our branding, and you don’t notice that it’s an additional layer.”
Creating seamless client experiences with Jotform Enterprise integrations
The Arbor Day Foundation keeps donors and members informed and connected with a series of events, including educational opportunities.
We have an event management system for a few of our conferences, but we like to keep the registration process simple and easy for members. Rather than asking everyone to install a dedicated app, we used Jotform Enterprise to manage registrations for our Member Summit event.
Rachel Fugate
We set up our annual Member Summit retreat at Arbor Day Farm in Nebraska using Jotform Enterprise and an integration with Card Connect to process the payments. It’s all going really smoothly.
Rachel Fugate
Fugate uses Jotform Enterprise daily to manage the Arbor Day Foundation website. “We run our external and internal webinars through Jotform Enterprise with a Zoom integration that automates the registration data,” she said. Fugate’s internal clients no longer need to manually add people to their webinars because the integration automatically records registrants and sends email reminders. “It’s all nicely automated,” she said.
Once the Foundation launches its planned new website, Fugate will consider a Jotform Enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) integration through Zapier to streamline the organization’s community planting proposals.
“I’m hoping we can use a tool like Jotform Enterprise to easily create forms that connect to our CRM with the ability to customize the look and feel, so they seamlessly integrate with our workflow and branding,” she said.
Fugate is also looking into using Jotform Approvals to replace an external request form currently built on ColdFusion.
I know Jotform Enterprise will improve this form without any coding. We’re finding all kinds of solutions
Rachel Fugate
Empowering teams, building collaboration, and saving time with Jotform Enterprise
Jotform Enterprise makes it easy for Arbor Day Foundation staff to collaborate and build on each other’s work. For simple projects, Fugate shares a basic form, and copywriters provide additional, relevant content. Forms for larger mailings, renewals, and appeals are often duplicates of existing forms that are changed as needed and shared with the team.
The ability to customize and adapt their forms equates to huge time savings for staff — especially those who were quick to adopt the more technical features of Jotform Enterprise forms.
People are always impressed by the conditional logic available in the forms and like the ability to pull in data based on URL parameters and use if/then statements. We used quite a bit of conditional logic for our 2022 Member Summit registration form.
Rachel Fugate
The teams at the Arbor Day Foundation are growing and making an intentional effort to handle things digitally and improve processes. The Events and Engagement team in particular has taken advantage of Jotform Enterprise to quickly build forms and gather, organize, and centralize data.
From global efforts to local projects, the Events and Engagement team works to match potential funders with projects worldwide. Once a project has a funder, the team gathers information for the day-of experience. Leveraging Jotform Enterprise, they create signup forms to get tree plantings and giveaways up and running in no time.
The customizability of Jotform Enterprise forms makes it easy to change things up to suit all of our programs’ processes.
Amy Lester, project coordinator for the Ventures team
Lester set up different project applications using Jotform Enterprise that her team can easily embed into the Arbor Day Foundation website. “The feasibility of incorporating our branding in a native-looking site is so simple!” she added.
Lester is a “big fan” of what Jotform Enterprise empowers her team to do so events run smoothly, from iterating on their event profile form to digitizing liability waivers and reporting options.
I love the QR code creation for onsite, quick access to our forms.
Amy Lester
Gathering information through our event profile form with Jotform Enterprise is a game-changer for keeping information all in one place. I don’t know how other foundations like ours operate their program coordination without a form process like this established. I would struggle if things were in a Word doc or floating in emails.
Amy Lester
The autonomy that Jotform Enterprise’s no-code, drag-and-drop functionality has given the Programs team reduces the strain on IT resources. “Utilizing one comprehensive form has simplified my process – along with the autonomy to change things up as needed without needing to put in an IT request or change the whole form,” said Lester.
Lester and her team recently needed to translate their liability and photo release forms into Greek for a project near Athens.
The ease of setting up, duplicating, and translating our forms — including the legal translation of our waiver — was incredible. Bringing 100 people out to a planting event and storing all of that information in one simple form was magic.
Amy Lester
Planting trees and reducing paper use
The Arbor Day Foundation also uses Jotform Enterprise in conjunction with their direct mail packages, so donors can respond online. One of their more successful campaigns was a collaboration with a corporate partner pointing recipients to the Arbor Day Foundation website, where they could enter a coupon code to plant a tree in someone’s honor. “We had more than 250,000 form submissions for tree plantings, and each generated an automatic confirmation of the request,” said Fugate. “It was really successful.”
As a benefit of working at the Arbor Day Foundation, employees get a discount at Lied Lodge at Arbor Day Farm. Before Jotform Enterprise, employees would make a reservation by printing out a form, filling it out, and faxing it. “We’ve converted the printed reservation form to an online form with Jotform Enterprise, which automatically alerts the registration desk.”
It’s also more secure. “Previously, employees would write their credit card information on the form, requiring it to be shredded or securely recycled,” said Fugate. “With Jotform Enterprise, the credit card information isn’t put on paper and we benefit from the online security features.”
The Arbor Day Foundation continues to find new ways to leverage Jotform Enterprise to amplify its mission to inspire people to plant, nurture, and celebrate trees.
Anybody who wants a less manual process for setting up forms and automating data-sharing with clients should consider Jotform Enterprise. It’s a great solution that can help scale organizations.
Amy Lester
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