Guide
Higher Education Automation: A Guide to No-Code Workflows
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Guide
Connect with us to learn how Formstack can help you digitize what matters, automate workflows, and fix processes—all without code.
Are you struggling to take control of projects at work? Are you reliant on the IT team when you need to implement new systems? Are inadequate processes, outdated technology, or complicated tools slowing down your workday?
If you shook your head yes to any of the above questions, you are not alone. In our 2021 No-Code Economy Survey, respondents said a lack of technical resources results in 28% of employees getting held back on projects and/or initiatives. This same lack of resources leads to 59% of projects being sometimes or often delayed.
These are harrowing statistics for anyone in the field of higher education. With incredibly tight budgets, limited resources, and a market that gets more competitive each year, there’s no time to waste waiting on IT or dealing with inefficient processes. Luckily, a change in the higher education technology landscape is providing ways to break free from the common pitfalls holding colleges and universities back. What is driving this change? The rise of no-code software.
You may not understand no-code by the name alone, but chances are you’re already using tools and tech based around its concept. In the last year, many educational institutions have realized they can no longer function on the systems, processes, and tools they’ve always relied on.
Working through a worldwide pandemic proved how quickly technology can help reimagine the way work gets done. From eliminating physical interactions and paper workflows to transitioning to virtual meetings and events, the digital transformation we all knew was coming arrived well before many were ready to welcome it. No-code tools, apps, and platforms made it possible for colleges and universities across the world to keep up with the need for warp-speed digitization and innovation.
So what is no-code? And how can it transform workflows at your institution? This guide will help you better understand no-code and how it can be used in higher education. You’ll also get four examples of automation in education you can quickly and easily implement using Formstack’s no-code tools.
Is no-code a new term to you? You’re not alone. In fact, according to our survey, 82% of people are unfamiliar with no-code. If you search the term no-code in Google, you’ll discover many different definitions for the term, ranging from simple to complex. For this guide, we decided to develop our own definition of no-code:
“No-code is a type of software development that allows anyone to create digital applications without writing a single line of code. It involves using tools with an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface to create a unique solution to a problem. The resulting solution can take many forms—from building mobile, voice, or ecommerce apps and websites to automating any number of tasks or processes.”
No-code tools include software, systems, or products that allow users to build a solution without needing to know any code. These tools enable non-technical workers, in any department, to create the processes, products, and tools they need to get work done—without needing support from IT. They help organizations become more digitally agile, which makes it easier to edit, change, and adapt workflows with limited investment of time, money, and technical resources.
This type of software provides you a visual arena to build your process, usually with a drag-and-drop menu of options. From creating payment systems and registration processes to building scholarship workflows and paperless financial aid applications, no-code makes it extremely quick and easy to develop solutions to your most difficult problems.
Now more than ever, colleges and universities need to be able to quickly adapt to the ever-evolving digital world. The preferences and abilities of students are changing, and if your processes and systems don’t keep up, you will begin to see your recruitment and retention efforts fail.
Whether your school serves hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of students, they will all expect a digital-first experience. Creating the best student experience starts with your internal processes, efficiencies, and tools. Achieving your goals, regardless of department or role, depends greatly on having the right tools and processes in place.
No-code is on the brink of changing the way people work—from automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks to building entirely new processes, products, and applications in just days versus months. Investing in no-code tools at your school can enable workers of all technical levels to achieve great results with less time, money, resources, and infrastructure. Here’s how no-code tools can benefit every team across your campus, from student services and recruitment to HR and facilities.
When your IT team is stretched thin and serving several departments across your institution at once, it can be difficult to get in their queue. Yet many complicated software systems require coding, which means IT has to help get your projects off the ground.
With no-code, you no longer have to rely on your IT team to build, test, or launch new tools, apps, or workflows; employees of all technical skills can quickly learn how to use them on their own. Plus, you can easily make edits and adjustments and see them in real time.
Your IT team will be thankful when you approach them about adding no-code tools to your campus tech stack. By enabling your team or department to be more autonomous, IT can focus their time on the technical tasks that require their expertise and abilities.
As a higher education professional, your life revolves around semester schedules and tight deadlines. You don’t have time to waste when trying to develop a new project or improve an existing process.
While traditional software may require months to learn the system, onboard employees, and develop, no-code tools take nowhere near this time to implement. Many higher education institutions can get up and running with no-code tools in mere weeks. In fact, our survey revealed that 50% of people choose to use no-code tools because they are easier to use and faster to develop than traditional software.
When your next project requires a quick turnaround time, you’ll be ready. Whether it’s spinning up processes for alumni engagement or streamlining how departments collect, store, and share data, no-code tools can help you get from idea to solution much faster. Because many no-code tools easily integrate with common higher education systems, you’ll be able to connect them to the most important tools in your campus’s tech stack.
Whether you work on a small or large campus, most educational institutions face issues when trying to share data across departments and schools. From paper forms getting lost through the interdepartmental mail to inconsistencies with how data integrates across tools, it can be incredibly difficult to streamline cross-campus processes. This can create dangerous data silos that impact productivity and information management.
Working in silos leads to poor data management, inefficient systems, and loads of manual work. No-code tools can help minimize, and even eliminate, many of these issues. Because no-code software can be used by employees of all skill levels and technical knowledge, it can easily fit into any department’s tech stack. This enables you to rely on one tool to streamline processes and workflows across many departments. No more paperwork, manual data entry, or complicated systems to learn.
When you need to rely on others to get your work done, it can create huge bottlenecks that are mostly out of your control. From relying on IT to implement a tool or update an integration to awaiting approval from a manager or tracking down paperwork, there are plenty of roadblocks that can impact your productivity.
No-code software puts the power to build in your hands, allowing you to update a web page, digitize assets, create robust workflows, and collect data. With a tool like Formstack, you can oversee the entire workflow from start to finish, enabling you to see, adjust, and fix any issues or bottlenecks in real time.
With no-code tools, you can quickly adapt as the needs of students, staff, and faculty change without ever needing to submit a support ticket to IT. Easily automate many of your most tedious tasks, such as reminding deans about approvals, automating eSignature reminders to faculty, or sending students notifications upon completion of an application.
Higher education is full of antiquated systems and inefficient processes. Jake’s mission is to change this through no-code technology.
Still running your workflows on paper, in manual spreadsheets, or across multiple tools? It’s time to end these inefficient processes and upgrade your workflows to something better by using no-code workflow automation.
Formstack’s no-code technology can empower your team to achieve more in less time. From completing daily tasks to building brand new systems and processes, you can build the workflows you need without relying on IT or needing to know how to code.
We specialize in helping higher education institutions streamline their processes and take control of their data management across teams, departments, and schools. Here’s how to use Formstack to streamline some of the most common higher education workflows.
Building a strong alumni base is a crucial part to securing support and funding for your college or university. One way to keep alumni engaged is by hosting events. Easily gather the information you need from alumni, accept payments, generate tickets, automate emails to registered guests, and follow up with an event survey.
Products: Forms · Documents
Features: Conversion Kit · Email Confirmations and Notifications · Discount Codes
Templates: Alumni Event Registration Form · Event Ticket · Event Survey
Optional Integrations: Salesforce · PayPal · OneDrive
Alumni can quickly register for upcoming events online through a short registration form. Enable discount codes to allow for alumni discounts and embed your preferred payment processor to securely collect payments. Add Conversion Kit to your form to access important conversion data that can help you fine-tune your form for maximum registrations. Keep alumni engagement officers in the loop by using data routing to send them data as it is submitted.
Pro Tip: Asking for additional donations on your event registration page? You can automatically send donors a donation receipt for their records.
Connect your form to Formstack Documents to automatically generate event tickets for attendees. Easily update the ticket template to adhere to your school’s branding and event theme. Email newly generated tickets to attendees immediately, and store copies for your records in your CRM or cloud storage app.
When building your form, you can easily set up automated email notifications in just a few clicks. No need to export any lists or integrate with your email system. Send registrants a confirmation email upon registration, then set a reminder email to send the day before the event. You can also send an email the day after the event with a link to your event survey to collect important alumni feedback.
Empower your fundraising team or advancement department by creating a simple, streamlined donation process. Securely accept online donations with branded forms, and easily create donor documentation, receipts, and thank yous. Give your team more time to focus on donors by automating everything from donation collection and receipt production to personalized letters and donor follow-up.
Products: Forms · Documents
Features: Secure Online Payments · Automatic Document Generation · Dynamic Document Content
Templates: Donation Form · Donation Receipt · Welcome Letter
Optional Integrations: Stripe · SharePoint · Lob
Donors can quickly, easily, and securely submit donations to your school or foundation through a mobile-friendly online donation form. Choose from a variety of payment options, and rest assured donations are captured safely with PCI compliant forms. Create multiple versions of your standard donation form, or use Smart Lists to manage field options—such as school, program, or donation level—across multiple forms.
Within minutes, donors can receive a clear, concise, and personalized donation receipt straight to their inbox. Once this document automation is set, you can simply let it run in the background without any manual data entry or manipulation. Every time a donation form is submitted, the receipt generation will run automatically. If you rely on a CRM, like Salesforce, you could also set this donation receipt to generate using data from your CRM.
Automatically customize thank you letters using dynamic content pulled from the data in your donation form, and send to donors within a week of donation. Easily manage mailings with an integration like Lob, which can automate printing, mailing, and tracking of personalized donation letters. Donor documentation can be sent to external storage, or data can be stored in your CRM, giving donor engagement specialists easy access to documentation and donor records. At the close of the year, advanced data routing can be used to compile an end-of-year donor packet.
Whether your campus is small or large, managing maintenance requests across sites can become complicated and confusing without a strong process in place. Your facility and maintenance team already has a lot on their hands—simplify their workday with this streamlined system for service and maintenance requests. Easily track new requests, generate work orders, and receive sign-off when the work is complete.
Products: Forms · Documents · Sign
Features: Conditional Logic · Advanced Data Routing · Mobile Signing
Templates: Maintenance Request Form · Move In & Move Out Inspection Form
Optional Integrations: Airtable · Excel · ShareFile
Streamline campus maintenance by creating an accessible maintenance request form. Use Conditional Logic to ask questions based on a specific location, floor, or service request type. Add a file upload section to capture images of any damages and issues for reference. The form can be embedded on your website or student intranet or added to Portals for easy navigation. Students, staff, and faculty can easily fill out the mobile-friendly form from their laptop, tablet, or phone.
Use Approvals with the service form to ensure all data needed to process a work order is collected. If further details are needed, or the service request is invalid, the approver can deny the form submission or send back to the submitter for more details. Once approved, data from the form is routed into a work order document and sent to the maintenance team responsible for the identified school, dorm, or site.
Upon completion of the work, the maintenance team member can sign off on the work order. Formstack Sign’s multiple participant workflow will then automatically send the work order document to the service requestor for eSignature to confirm completion of the request. Automate text or email reminders to ensure the service requestor signs off on the document within a specific window of time. If an on-site inspection is necessary, the document can be signed in person by both parties from a mobile device.
Offering a seamless student application experience is crucial to converting prospective students into active ones. If you’re still reliant on paper processes or complicated application systems, you’re probably losing out on potential students. Simplify the process by offering a completely digital, mobile-friendly student enrollment, financial aid, and scholarship workflow to potential and current students. Your admissions team will love how simple, easy, and efficient this workflow is to build, manage, and edit.
Products: Forms · Documents · Sign
Features: Workflows · Portals · File Uploads · WCAG & Section 508 Compliance
Templates: Scholarship Application · College Application · Certificate
Optional Integrations: Dropbox · Trello · Google Cloud Print
If you’re transitioning from paper forms to digital, Formstack’s no-code, drag-and-drop form builder makes building forms quick and easy. Applications can be embedded on your website or added to your school’s Portal, which can serve as a hub to collect and store student data. Students can securely upload their information, resume, transcript, financial documentation, and letters of recommendation, all within one online form.
Pro Tip: Add Save and Resume to the form to allow students to build their application over time.
Once submitted, the student is sent a confirmation email, and Workflows routes the information to the financial aid and registrar offices for review. If data is found to be missing or inaccurate, the reviewer can send the form back to the student to edit or update. Sections can be assigned to various team members, allowing different departments to review the application at the same time. Steps in the workflow can be tracked in the Workspace, which minimizes bottlenecks and ensures the process flows smoothly.
Leslie shares how Augustana College uses Formstack to streamline work among professors, staff, students, and departments.
If the student is accepted and financial aid or scholarships are awarded, data from the form can be routed into an acceptance letter and certificate. To protect financial information and details, extra security can be added to your documentation to ensure it is sent securely. If signatures are needed from the student to accept their spot, financial aid, or scholarship, Formstack Sign is incredibly easy to use alongside Formstack Documents for streamlined eSignature collection.
If you’re ready to be less reliant on your IT team and more in control of your daily workflows, we have an interactive checklist that can help you choose the right no-code solution for your college or university. Click below to access and use this fillable resource to organize your thoughts, outline what you’re looking for in a solution, and prepare your team for implementation.
Are you struggling to take control of projects at work? Are you reliant on the IT team when you need to implement new systems? Are inadequate processes, outdated technology, or complicated tools slowing down your workday?
If you shook your head yes to any of the above questions, you are not alone. In our 2021 No-Code Economy Survey, respondents said a lack of technical resources results in 28% of employees getting held back on projects and/or initiatives. This same lack of resources leads to 59% of projects being sometimes or often delayed.
These are harrowing statistics for anyone in the field of higher education. With incredibly tight budgets, limited resources, and a market that gets more competitive each year, there’s no time to waste waiting on IT or dealing with inefficient processes. Luckily, a change in the higher education technology landscape is providing ways to break free from the common pitfalls holding colleges and universities back. What is driving this change? The rise of no-code software.
You may not understand no-code by the name alone, but chances are you’re already using tools and tech based around its concept. In the last year, many educational institutions have realized they can no longer function on the systems, processes, and tools they’ve always relied on.
Working through a worldwide pandemic proved how quickly technology can help reimagine the way work gets done. From eliminating physical interactions and paper workflows to transitioning to virtual meetings and events, the digital transformation we all knew was coming arrived well before many were ready to welcome it. No-code tools, apps, and platforms made it possible for colleges and universities across the world to keep up with the need for warp-speed digitization and innovation.
So what is no-code? And how can it transform workflows at your institution? This guide will help you better understand no-code and how it can be used in higher education. You’ll also get four examples of automation in education you can quickly and easily implement using Formstack’s no-code tools.
Is no-code a new term to you? You’re not alone. In fact, according to our survey, 82% of people are unfamiliar with no-code. If you search the term no-code in Google, you’ll discover many different definitions for the term, ranging from simple to complex. For this guide, we decided to develop our own definition of no-code:
“No-code is a type of software development that allows anyone to create digital applications without writing a single line of code. It involves using tools with an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface to create a unique solution to a problem. The resulting solution can take many forms—from building mobile, voice, or ecommerce apps and websites to automating any number of tasks or processes.”
No-code tools include software, systems, or products that allow users to build a solution without needing to know any code. These tools enable non-technical workers, in any department, to create the processes, products, and tools they need to get work done—without needing support from IT. They help organizations become more digitally agile, which makes it easier to edit, change, and adapt workflows with limited investment of time, money, and technical resources.
This type of software provides you a visual arena to build your process, usually with a drag-and-drop menu of options. From creating payment systems and registration processes to building scholarship workflows and paperless financial aid applications, no-code makes it extremely quick and easy to develop solutions to your most difficult problems.
Now more than ever, colleges and universities need to be able to quickly adapt to the ever-evolving digital world. The preferences and abilities of students are changing, and if your processes and systems don’t keep up, you will begin to see your recruitment and retention efforts fail.
Whether your school serves hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of students, they will all expect a digital-first experience. Creating the best student experience starts with your internal processes, efficiencies, and tools. Achieving your goals, regardless of department or role, depends greatly on having the right tools and processes in place.
No-code is on the brink of changing the way people work—from automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks to building entirely new processes, products, and applications in just days versus months. Investing in no-code tools at your school can enable workers of all technical levels to achieve great results with less time, money, resources, and infrastructure. Here’s how no-code tools can benefit every team across your campus, from student services and recruitment to HR and facilities.
When your IT team is stretched thin and serving several departments across your institution at once, it can be difficult to get in their queue. Yet many complicated software systems require coding, which means IT has to help get your projects off the ground.
With no-code, you no longer have to rely on your IT team to build, test, or launch new tools, apps, or workflows; employees of all technical skills can quickly learn how to use them on their own. Plus, you can easily make edits and adjustments and see them in real time.
Your IT team will be thankful when you approach them about adding no-code tools to your campus tech stack. By enabling your team or department to be more autonomous, IT can focus their time on the technical tasks that require their expertise and abilities.
As a higher education professional, your life revolves around semester schedules and tight deadlines. You don’t have time to waste when trying to develop a new project or improve an existing process.
While traditional software may require months to learn the system, onboard employees, and develop, no-code tools take nowhere near this time to implement. Many higher education institutions can get up and running with no-code tools in mere weeks. In fact, our survey revealed that 50% of people choose to use no-code tools because they are easier to use and faster to develop than traditional software.
When your next project requires a quick turnaround time, you’ll be ready. Whether it’s spinning up processes for alumni engagement or streamlining how departments collect, store, and share data, no-code tools can help you get from idea to solution much faster. Because many no-code tools easily integrate with common higher education systems, you’ll be able to connect them to the most important tools in your campus’s tech stack.
Whether you work on a small or large campus, most educational institutions face issues when trying to share data across departments and schools. From paper forms getting lost through the interdepartmental mail to inconsistencies with how data integrates across tools, it can be incredibly difficult to streamline cross-campus processes. This can create dangerous data silos that impact productivity and information management.
Working in silos leads to poor data management, inefficient systems, and loads of manual work. No-code tools can help minimize, and even eliminate, many of these issues. Because no-code software can be used by employees of all skill levels and technical knowledge, it can easily fit into any department’s tech stack. This enables you to rely on one tool to streamline processes and workflows across many departments. No more paperwork, manual data entry, or complicated systems to learn.
When you need to rely on others to get your work done, it can create huge bottlenecks that are mostly out of your control. From relying on IT to implement a tool or update an integration to awaiting approval from a manager or tracking down paperwork, there are plenty of roadblocks that can impact your productivity.
No-code software puts the power to build in your hands, allowing you to update a web page, digitize assets, create robust workflows, and collect data. With a tool like Formstack, you can oversee the entire workflow from start to finish, enabling you to see, adjust, and fix any issues or bottlenecks in real time.
With no-code tools, you can quickly adapt as the needs of students, staff, and faculty change without ever needing to submit a support ticket to IT. Easily automate many of your most tedious tasks, such as reminding deans about approvals, automating eSignature reminders to faculty, or sending students notifications upon completion of an application.
Higher education is full of antiquated systems and inefficient processes. Jake’s mission is to change this through no-code technology.
Still running your workflows on paper, in manual spreadsheets, or across multiple tools? It’s time to end these inefficient processes and upgrade your workflows to something better by using no-code workflow automation.
Formstack’s no-code technology can empower your team to achieve more in less time. From completing daily tasks to building brand new systems and processes, you can build the workflows you need without relying on IT or needing to know how to code.
We specialize in helping higher education institutions streamline their processes and take control of their data management across teams, departments, and schools. Here’s how to use Formstack to streamline some of the most common higher education workflows.
Building a strong alumni base is a crucial part to securing support and funding for your college or university. One way to keep alumni engaged is by hosting events. Easily gather the information you need from alumni, accept payments, generate tickets, automate emails to registered guests, and follow up with an event survey.
Products: Forms · Documents
Features: Conversion Kit · Email Confirmations and Notifications · Discount Codes
Templates: Alumni Event Registration Form · Event Ticket · Event Survey
Optional Integrations: Salesforce · PayPal · OneDrive
Alumni can quickly register for upcoming events online through a short registration form. Enable discount codes to allow for alumni discounts and embed your preferred payment processor to securely collect payments. Add Conversion Kit to your form to access important conversion data that can help you fine-tune your form for maximum registrations. Keep alumni engagement officers in the loop by using data routing to send them data as it is submitted.
Pro Tip: Asking for additional donations on your event registration page? You can automatically send donors a donation receipt for their records.
Connect your form to Formstack Documents to automatically generate event tickets for attendees. Easily update the ticket template to adhere to your school’s branding and event theme. Email newly generated tickets to attendees immediately, and store copies for your records in your CRM or cloud storage app.
When building your form, you can easily set up automated email notifications in just a few clicks. No need to export any lists or integrate with your email system. Send registrants a confirmation email upon registration, then set a reminder email to send the day before the event. You can also send an email the day after the event with a link to your event survey to collect important alumni feedback.
Empower your fundraising team or advancement department by creating a simple, streamlined donation process. Securely accept online donations with branded forms, and easily create donor documentation, receipts, and thank yous. Give your team more time to focus on donors by automating everything from donation collection and receipt production to personalized letters and donor follow-up.
Products: Forms · Documents
Features: Secure Online Payments · Automatic Document Generation · Dynamic Document Content
Templates: Donation Form · Donation Receipt · Welcome Letter
Optional Integrations: Stripe · SharePoint · Lob
Donors can quickly, easily, and securely submit donations to your school or foundation through a mobile-friendly online donation form. Choose from a variety of payment options, and rest assured donations are captured safely with PCI compliant forms. Create multiple versions of your standard donation form, or use Smart Lists to manage field options—such as school, program, or donation level—across multiple forms.
Within minutes, donors can receive a clear, concise, and personalized donation receipt straight to their inbox. Once this document automation is set, you can simply let it run in the background without any manual data entry or manipulation. Every time a donation form is submitted, the receipt generation will run automatically. If you rely on a CRM, like Salesforce, you could also set this donation receipt to generate using data from your CRM.
Automatically customize thank you letters using dynamic content pulled from the data in your donation form, and send to donors within a week of donation. Easily manage mailings with an integration like Lob, which can automate printing, mailing, and tracking of personalized donation letters. Donor documentation can be sent to external storage, or data can be stored in your CRM, giving donor engagement specialists easy access to documentation and donor records. At the close of the year, advanced data routing can be used to compile an end-of-year donor packet.
Whether your campus is small or large, managing maintenance requests across sites can become complicated and confusing without a strong process in place. Your facility and maintenance team already has a lot on their hands—simplify their workday with this streamlined system for service and maintenance requests. Easily track new requests, generate work orders, and receive sign-off when the work is complete.
Products: Forms · Documents · Sign
Features: Conditional Logic · Advanced Data Routing · Mobile Signing
Templates: Maintenance Request Form · Move In & Move Out Inspection Form
Optional Integrations: Airtable · Excel · ShareFile
Streamline campus maintenance by creating an accessible maintenance request form. Use Conditional Logic to ask questions based on a specific location, floor, or service request type. Add a file upload section to capture images of any damages and issues for reference. The form can be embedded on your website or student intranet or added to Portals for easy navigation. Students, staff, and faculty can easily fill out the mobile-friendly form from their laptop, tablet, or phone.
Use Approvals with the service form to ensure all data needed to process a work order is collected. If further details are needed, or the service request is invalid, the approver can deny the form submission or send back to the submitter for more details. Once approved, data from the form is routed into a work order document and sent to the maintenance team responsible for the identified school, dorm, or site.
Upon completion of the work, the maintenance team member can sign off on the work order. Formstack Sign’s multiple participant workflow will then automatically send the work order document to the service requestor for eSignature to confirm completion of the request. Automate text or email reminders to ensure the service requestor signs off on the document within a specific window of time. If an on-site inspection is necessary, the document can be signed in person by both parties from a mobile device.
Offering a seamless student application experience is crucial to converting prospective students into active ones. If you’re still reliant on paper processes or complicated application systems, you’re probably losing out on potential students. Simplify the process by offering a completely digital, mobile-friendly student enrollment, financial aid, and scholarship workflow to potential and current students. Your admissions team will love how simple, easy, and efficient this workflow is to build, manage, and edit.
Products: Forms · Documents · Sign
Features: Workflows · Portals · File Uploads · WCAG & Section 508 Compliance
Templates: Scholarship Application · College Application · Certificate
Optional Integrations: Dropbox · Trello · Google Cloud Print
If you’re transitioning from paper forms to digital, Formstack’s no-code, drag-and-drop form builder makes building forms quick and easy. Applications can be embedded on your website or added to your school’s Portal, which can serve as a hub to collect and store student data. Students can securely upload their information, resume, transcript, financial documentation, and letters of recommendation, all within one online form.
Pro Tip: Add Save and Resume to the form to allow students to build their application over time.
Once submitted, the student is sent a confirmation email, and Workflows routes the information to the financial aid and registrar offices for review. If data is found to be missing or inaccurate, the reviewer can send the form back to the student to edit or update. Sections can be assigned to various team members, allowing different departments to review the application at the same time. Steps in the workflow can be tracked in the Workspace, which minimizes bottlenecks and ensures the process flows smoothly.
Leslie shares how Augustana College uses Formstack to streamline work among professors, staff, students, and departments.
If the student is accepted and financial aid or scholarships are awarded, data from the form can be routed into an acceptance letter and certificate. To protect financial information and details, extra security can be added to your documentation to ensure it is sent securely. If signatures are needed from the student to accept their spot, financial aid, or scholarship, Formstack Sign is incredibly easy to use alongside Formstack Documents for streamlined eSignature collection.
If you’re ready to be less reliant on your IT team and more in control of your daily workflows, we have an interactive checklist that can help you choose the right no-code solution for your college or university. Click below to access and use this fillable resource to organize your thoughts, outline what you’re looking for in a solution, and prepare your team for implementation.
Are you struggling to take control of projects at work? Are you reliant on the IT team when you need to implement new systems? Are inadequate processes, outdated technology, or complicated tools slowing down your workday?
If you shook your head yes to any of the above questions, you are not alone. In our 2021 No-Code Economy Survey, respondents said a lack of technical resources results in 28% of employees getting held back on projects and/or initiatives. This same lack of resources leads to 59% of projects being sometimes or often delayed.
These are harrowing statistics for anyone in the field of higher education. With incredibly tight budgets, limited resources, and a market that gets more competitive each year, there’s no time to waste waiting on IT or dealing with inefficient processes. Luckily, a change in the higher education technology landscape is providing ways to break free from the common pitfalls holding colleges and universities back. What is driving this change? The rise of no-code software.
You may not understand no-code by the name alone, but chances are you’re already using tools and tech based around its concept. In the last year, many educational institutions have realized they can no longer function on the systems, processes, and tools they’ve always relied on.
Working through a worldwide pandemic proved how quickly technology can help reimagine the way work gets done. From eliminating physical interactions and paper workflows to transitioning to virtual meetings and events, the digital transformation we all knew was coming arrived well before many were ready to welcome it. No-code tools, apps, and platforms made it possible for colleges and universities across the world to keep up with the need for warp-speed digitization and innovation.
So what is no-code? And how can it transform workflows at your institution? This guide will help you better understand no-code and how it can be used in higher education. You’ll also get four examples of automation in education you can quickly and easily implement using Formstack’s no-code tools.
Is no-code a new term to you? You’re not alone. In fact, according to our survey, 82% of people are unfamiliar with no-code. If you search the term no-code in Google, you’ll discover many different definitions for the term, ranging from simple to complex. For this guide, we decided to develop our own definition of no-code:
“No-code is a type of software development that allows anyone to create digital applications without writing a single line of code. It involves using tools with an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface to create a unique solution to a problem. The resulting solution can take many forms—from building mobile, voice, or ecommerce apps and websites to automating any number of tasks or processes.”
No-code tools include software, systems, or products that allow users to build a solution without needing to know any code. These tools enable non-technical workers, in any department, to create the processes, products, and tools they need to get work done—without needing support from IT. They help organizations become more digitally agile, which makes it easier to edit, change, and adapt workflows with limited investment of time, money, and technical resources.
This type of software provides you a visual arena to build your process, usually with a drag-and-drop menu of options. From creating payment systems and registration processes to building scholarship workflows and paperless financial aid applications, no-code makes it extremely quick and easy to develop solutions to your most difficult problems.
Now more than ever, colleges and universities need to be able to quickly adapt to the ever-evolving digital world. The preferences and abilities of students are changing, and if your processes and systems don’t keep up, you will begin to see your recruitment and retention efforts fail.
Whether your school serves hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of students, they will all expect a digital-first experience. Creating the best student experience starts with your internal processes, efficiencies, and tools. Achieving your goals, regardless of department or role, depends greatly on having the right tools and processes in place.
No-code is on the brink of changing the way people work—from automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks to building entirely new processes, products, and applications in just days versus months. Investing in no-code tools at your school can enable workers of all technical levels to achieve great results with less time, money, resources, and infrastructure. Here’s how no-code tools can benefit every team across your campus, from student services and recruitment to HR and facilities.
When your IT team is stretched thin and serving several departments across your institution at once, it can be difficult to get in their queue. Yet many complicated software systems require coding, which means IT has to help get your projects off the ground.
With no-code, you no longer have to rely on your IT team to build, test, or launch new tools, apps, or workflows; employees of all technical skills can quickly learn how to use them on their own. Plus, you can easily make edits and adjustments and see them in real time.
Your IT team will be thankful when you approach them about adding no-code tools to your campus tech stack. By enabling your team or department to be more autonomous, IT can focus their time on the technical tasks that require their expertise and abilities.
As a higher education professional, your life revolves around semester schedules and tight deadlines. You don’t have time to waste when trying to develop a new project or improve an existing process.
While traditional software may require months to learn the system, onboard employees, and develop, no-code tools take nowhere near this time to implement. Many higher education institutions can get up and running with no-code tools in mere weeks. In fact, our survey revealed that 50% of people choose to use no-code tools because they are easier to use and faster to develop than traditional software.
When your next project requires a quick turnaround time, you’ll be ready. Whether it’s spinning up processes for alumni engagement or streamlining how departments collect, store, and share data, no-code tools can help you get from idea to solution much faster. Because many no-code tools easily integrate with common higher education systems, you’ll be able to connect them to the most important tools in your campus’s tech stack.
Whether you work on a small or large campus, most educational institutions face issues when trying to share data across departments and schools. From paper forms getting lost through the interdepartmental mail to inconsistencies with how data integrates across tools, it can be incredibly difficult to streamline cross-campus processes. This can create dangerous data silos that impact productivity and information management.
Working in silos leads to poor data management, inefficient systems, and loads of manual work. No-code tools can help minimize, and even eliminate, many of these issues. Because no-code software can be used by employees of all skill levels and technical knowledge, it can easily fit into any department’s tech stack. This enables you to rely on one tool to streamline processes and workflows across many departments. No more paperwork, manual data entry, or complicated systems to learn.
When you need to rely on others to get your work done, it can create huge bottlenecks that are mostly out of your control. From relying on IT to implement a tool or update an integration to awaiting approval from a manager or tracking down paperwork, there are plenty of roadblocks that can impact your productivity.
No-code software puts the power to build in your hands, allowing you to update a web page, digitize assets, create robust workflows, and collect data. With a tool like Formstack, you can oversee the entire workflow from start to finish, enabling you to see, adjust, and fix any issues or bottlenecks in real time.
With no-code tools, you can quickly adapt as the needs of students, staff, and faculty change without ever needing to submit a support ticket to IT. Easily automate many of your most tedious tasks, such as reminding deans about approvals, automating eSignature reminders to faculty, or sending students notifications upon completion of an application.
Higher education is full of antiquated systems and inefficient processes. Jake’s mission is to change this through no-code technology.
Still running your workflows on paper, in manual spreadsheets, or across multiple tools? It’s time to end these inefficient processes and upgrade your workflows to something better by using no-code workflow automation.
Formstack’s no-code technology can empower your team to achieve more in less time. From completing daily tasks to building brand new systems and processes, you can build the workflows you need without relying on IT or needing to know how to code.
We specialize in helping higher education institutions streamline their processes and take control of their data management across teams, departments, and schools. Here’s how to use Formstack to streamline some of the most common higher education workflows.
Building a strong alumni base is a crucial part to securing support and funding for your college or university. One way to keep alumni engaged is by hosting events. Easily gather the information you need from alumni, accept payments, generate tickets, automate emails to registered guests, and follow up with an event survey.
Products: Forms · Documents
Features: Conversion Kit · Email Confirmations and Notifications · Discount Codes
Templates: Alumni Event Registration Form · Event Ticket · Event Survey
Optional Integrations: Salesforce · PayPal · OneDrive
Alumni can quickly register for upcoming events online through a short registration form. Enable discount codes to allow for alumni discounts and embed your preferred payment processor to securely collect payments. Add Conversion Kit to your form to access important conversion data that can help you fine-tune your form for maximum registrations. Keep alumni engagement officers in the loop by using data routing to send them data as it is submitted.
Pro Tip: Asking for additional donations on your event registration page? You can automatically send donors a donation receipt for their records.
Connect your form to Formstack Documents to automatically generate event tickets for attendees. Easily update the ticket template to adhere to your school’s branding and event theme. Email newly generated tickets to attendees immediately, and store copies for your records in your CRM or cloud storage app.
When building your form, you can easily set up automated email notifications in just a few clicks. No need to export any lists or integrate with your email system. Send registrants a confirmation email upon registration, then set a reminder email to send the day before the event. You can also send an email the day after the event with a link to your event survey to collect important alumni feedback.
Empower your fundraising team or advancement department by creating a simple, streamlined donation process. Securely accept online donations with branded forms, and easily create donor documentation, receipts, and thank yous. Give your team more time to focus on donors by automating everything from donation collection and receipt production to personalized letters and donor follow-up.
Products: Forms · Documents
Features: Secure Online Payments · Automatic Document Generation · Dynamic Document Content
Templates: Donation Form · Donation Receipt · Welcome Letter
Optional Integrations: Stripe · SharePoint · Lob
Donors can quickly, easily, and securely submit donations to your school or foundation through a mobile-friendly online donation form. Choose from a variety of payment options, and rest assured donations are captured safely with PCI compliant forms. Create multiple versions of your standard donation form, or use Smart Lists to manage field options—such as school, program, or donation level—across multiple forms.
Within minutes, donors can receive a clear, concise, and personalized donation receipt straight to their inbox. Once this document automation is set, you can simply let it run in the background without any manual data entry or manipulation. Every time a donation form is submitted, the receipt generation will run automatically. If you rely on a CRM, like Salesforce, you could also set this donation receipt to generate using data from your CRM.
Automatically customize thank you letters using dynamic content pulled from the data in your donation form, and send to donors within a week of donation. Easily manage mailings with an integration like Lob, which can automate printing, mailing, and tracking of personalized donation letters. Donor documentation can be sent to external storage, or data can be stored in your CRM, giving donor engagement specialists easy access to documentation and donor records. At the close of the year, advanced data routing can be used to compile an end-of-year donor packet.
Whether your campus is small or large, managing maintenance requests across sites can become complicated and confusing without a strong process in place. Your facility and maintenance team already has a lot on their hands—simplify their workday with this streamlined system for service and maintenance requests. Easily track new requests, generate work orders, and receive sign-off when the work is complete.
Products: Forms · Documents · Sign
Features: Conditional Logic · Advanced Data Routing · Mobile Signing
Templates: Maintenance Request Form · Move In & Move Out Inspection Form
Optional Integrations: Airtable · Excel · ShareFile
Streamline campus maintenance by creating an accessible maintenance request form. Use Conditional Logic to ask questions based on a specific location, floor, or service request type. Add a file upload section to capture images of any damages and issues for reference. The form can be embedded on your website or student intranet or added to Portals for easy navigation. Students, staff, and faculty can easily fill out the mobile-friendly form from their laptop, tablet, or phone.
Use Approvals with the service form to ensure all data needed to process a work order is collected. If further details are needed, or the service request is invalid, the approver can deny the form submission or send back to the submitter for more details. Once approved, data from the form is routed into a work order document and sent to the maintenance team responsible for the identified school, dorm, or site.
Upon completion of the work, the maintenance team member can sign off on the work order. Formstack Sign’s multiple participant workflow will then automatically send the work order document to the service requestor for eSignature to confirm completion of the request. Automate text or email reminders to ensure the service requestor signs off on the document within a specific window of time. If an on-site inspection is necessary, the document can be signed in person by both parties from a mobile device.
Offering a seamless student application experience is crucial to converting prospective students into active ones. If you’re still reliant on paper processes or complicated application systems, you’re probably losing out on potential students. Simplify the process by offering a completely digital, mobile-friendly student enrollment, financial aid, and scholarship workflow to potential and current students. Your admissions team will love how simple, easy, and efficient this workflow is to build, manage, and edit.
Products: Forms · Documents · Sign
Features: Workflows · Portals · File Uploads · WCAG & Section 508 Compliance
Templates: Scholarship Application · College Application · Certificate
Optional Integrations: Dropbox · Trello · Google Cloud Print
If you’re transitioning from paper forms to digital, Formstack’s no-code, drag-and-drop form builder makes building forms quick and easy. Applications can be embedded on your website or added to your school’s Portal, which can serve as a hub to collect and store student data. Students can securely upload their information, resume, transcript, financial documentation, and letters of recommendation, all within one online form.
Pro Tip: Add Save and Resume to the form to allow students to build their application over time.
Once submitted, the student is sent a confirmation email, and Workflows routes the information to the financial aid and registrar offices for review. If data is found to be missing or inaccurate, the reviewer can send the form back to the student to edit or update. Sections can be assigned to various team members, allowing different departments to review the application at the same time. Steps in the workflow can be tracked in the Workspace, which minimizes bottlenecks and ensures the process flows smoothly.
Leslie shares how Augustana College uses Formstack to streamline work among professors, staff, students, and departments.
If the student is accepted and financial aid or scholarships are awarded, data from the form can be routed into an acceptance letter and certificate. To protect financial information and details, extra security can be added to your documentation to ensure it is sent securely. If signatures are needed from the student to accept their spot, financial aid, or scholarship, Formstack Sign is incredibly easy to use alongside Formstack Documents for streamlined eSignature collection.
If you’re ready to be less reliant on your IT team and more in control of your daily workflows, we have an interactive checklist that can help you choose the right no-code solution for your college or university. Click below to access and use this fillable resource to organize your thoughts, outline what you’re looking for in a solution, and prepare your team for implementation.
Are you struggling to take control of projects at work? Are you reliant on the IT team when you need to implement new systems? Are inadequate processes, outdated technology, or complicated tools slowing down your workday?
If you shook your head yes to any of the above questions, you are not alone. In our 2021 No-Code Economy Survey, respondents said a lack of technical resources results in 28% of employees getting held back on projects and/or initiatives. This same lack of resources leads to 59% of projects being sometimes or often delayed.
These are harrowing statistics for anyone in the field of higher education. With incredibly tight budgets, limited resources, and a market that gets more competitive each year, there’s no time to waste waiting on IT or dealing with inefficient processes. Luckily, a change in the higher education technology landscape is providing ways to break free from the common pitfalls holding colleges and universities back. What is driving this change? The rise of no-code software.
You may not understand no-code by the name alone, but chances are you’re already using tools and tech based around its concept. In the last year, many educational institutions have realized they can no longer function on the systems, processes, and tools they’ve always relied on.
Working through a worldwide pandemic proved how quickly technology can help reimagine the way work gets done. From eliminating physical interactions and paper workflows to transitioning to virtual meetings and events, the digital transformation we all knew was coming arrived well before many were ready to welcome it. No-code tools, apps, and platforms made it possible for colleges and universities across the world to keep up with the need for warp-speed digitization and innovation.
So what is no-code? And how can it transform workflows at your institution? This guide will help you better understand no-code and how it can be used in higher education. You’ll also get four examples of automation in education you can quickly and easily implement using Formstack’s no-code tools.
Is no-code a new term to you? You’re not alone. In fact, according to our survey, 82% of people are unfamiliar with no-code. If you search the term no-code in Google, you’ll discover many different definitions for the term, ranging from simple to complex. For this guide, we decided to develop our own definition of no-code:
“No-code is a type of software development that allows anyone to create digital applications without writing a single line of code. It involves using tools with an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface to create a unique solution to a problem. The resulting solution can take many forms—from building mobile, voice, or ecommerce apps and websites to automating any number of tasks or processes.”
No-code tools include software, systems, or products that allow users to build a solution without needing to know any code. These tools enable non-technical workers, in any department, to create the processes, products, and tools they need to get work done—without needing support from IT. They help organizations become more digitally agile, which makes it easier to edit, change, and adapt workflows with limited investment of time, money, and technical resources.
This type of software provides you a visual arena to build your process, usually with a drag-and-drop menu of options. From creating payment systems and registration processes to building scholarship workflows and paperless financial aid applications, no-code makes it extremely quick and easy to develop solutions to your most difficult problems.
Now more than ever, colleges and universities need to be able to quickly adapt to the ever-evolving digital world. The preferences and abilities of students are changing, and if your processes and systems don’t keep up, you will begin to see your recruitment and retention efforts fail.
Whether your school serves hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of students, they will all expect a digital-first experience. Creating the best student experience starts with your internal processes, efficiencies, and tools. Achieving your goals, regardless of department or role, depends greatly on having the right tools and processes in place.
No-code is on the brink of changing the way people work—from automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks to building entirely new processes, products, and applications in just days versus months. Investing in no-code tools at your school can enable workers of all technical levels to achieve great results with less time, money, resources, and infrastructure. Here’s how no-code tools can benefit every team across your campus, from student services and recruitment to HR and facilities.
When your IT team is stretched thin and serving several departments across your institution at once, it can be difficult to get in their queue. Yet many complicated software systems require coding, which means IT has to help get your projects off the ground.
With no-code, you no longer have to rely on your IT team to build, test, or launch new tools, apps, or workflows; employees of all technical skills can quickly learn how to use them on their own. Plus, you can easily make edits and adjustments and see them in real time.
Your IT team will be thankful when you approach them about adding no-code tools to your campus tech stack. By enabling your team or department to be more autonomous, IT can focus their time on the technical tasks that require their expertise and abilities.
As a higher education professional, your life revolves around semester schedules and tight deadlines. You don’t have time to waste when trying to develop a new project or improve an existing process.
While traditional software may require months to learn the system, onboard employees, and develop, no-code tools take nowhere near this time to implement. Many higher education institutions can get up and running with no-code tools in mere weeks. In fact, our survey revealed that 50% of people choose to use no-code tools because they are easier to use and faster to develop than traditional software.
When your next project requires a quick turnaround time, you’ll be ready. Whether it’s spinning up processes for alumni engagement or streamlining how departments collect, store, and share data, no-code tools can help you get from idea to solution much faster. Because many no-code tools easily integrate with common higher education systems, you’ll be able to connect them to the most important tools in your campus’s tech stack.
Whether you work on a small or large campus, most educational institutions face issues when trying to share data across departments and schools. From paper forms getting lost through the interdepartmental mail to inconsistencies with how data integrates across tools, it can be incredibly difficult to streamline cross-campus processes. This can create dangerous data silos that impact productivity and information management.
Working in silos leads to poor data management, inefficient systems, and loads of manual work. No-code tools can help minimize, and even eliminate, many of these issues. Because no-code software can be used by employees of all skill levels and technical knowledge, it can easily fit into any department’s tech stack. This enables you to rely on one tool to streamline processes and workflows across many departments. No more paperwork, manual data entry, or complicated systems to learn.
When you need to rely on others to get your work done, it can create huge bottlenecks that are mostly out of your control. From relying on IT to implement a tool or update an integration to awaiting approval from a manager or tracking down paperwork, there are plenty of roadblocks that can impact your productivity.
No-code software puts the power to build in your hands, allowing you to update a web page, digitize assets, create robust workflows, and collect data. With a tool like Formstack, you can oversee the entire workflow from start to finish, enabling you to see, adjust, and fix any issues or bottlenecks in real time.
With no-code tools, you can quickly adapt as the needs of students, staff, and faculty change without ever needing to submit a support ticket to IT. Easily automate many of your most tedious tasks, such as reminding deans about approvals, automating eSignature reminders to faculty, or sending students notifications upon completion of an application.
Higher education is full of antiquated systems and inefficient processes. Jake’s mission is to change this through no-code technology.
Still running your workflows on paper, in manual spreadsheets, or across multiple tools? It’s time to end these inefficient processes and upgrade your workflows to something better by using no-code workflow automation.
Formstack’s no-code technology can empower your team to achieve more in less time. From completing daily tasks to building brand new systems and processes, you can build the workflows you need without relying on IT or needing to know how to code.
We specialize in helping higher education institutions streamline their processes and take control of their data management across teams, departments, and schools. Here’s how to use Formstack to streamline some of the most common higher education workflows.
Building a strong alumni base is a crucial part to securing support and funding for your college or university. One way to keep alumni engaged is by hosting events. Easily gather the information you need from alumni, accept payments, generate tickets, automate emails to registered guests, and follow up with an event survey.
Products: Forms · Documents
Features: Conversion Kit · Email Confirmations and Notifications · Discount Codes
Templates: Alumni Event Registration Form · Event Ticket · Event Survey
Optional Integrations: Salesforce · PayPal · OneDrive
Alumni can quickly register for upcoming events online through a short registration form. Enable discount codes to allow for alumni discounts and embed your preferred payment processor to securely collect payments. Add Conversion Kit to your form to access important conversion data that can help you fine-tune your form for maximum registrations. Keep alumni engagement officers in the loop by using data routing to send them data as it is submitted.
Pro Tip: Asking for additional donations on your event registration page? You can automatically send donors a donation receipt for their records.
Connect your form to Formstack Documents to automatically generate event tickets for attendees. Easily update the ticket template to adhere to your school’s branding and event theme. Email newly generated tickets to attendees immediately, and store copies for your records in your CRM or cloud storage app.
When building your form, you can easily set up automated email notifications in just a few clicks. No need to export any lists or integrate with your email system. Send registrants a confirmation email upon registration, then set a reminder email to send the day before the event. You can also send an email the day after the event with a link to your event survey to collect important alumni feedback.
Empower your fundraising team or advancement department by creating a simple, streamlined donation process. Securely accept online donations with branded forms, and easily create donor documentation, receipts, and thank yous. Give your team more time to focus on donors by automating everything from donation collection and receipt production to personalized letters and donor follow-up.
Products: Forms · Documents
Features: Secure Online Payments · Automatic Document Generation · Dynamic Document Content
Templates: Donation Form · Donation Receipt · Welcome Letter
Optional Integrations: Stripe · SharePoint · Lob
Donors can quickly, easily, and securely submit donations to your school or foundation through a mobile-friendly online donation form. Choose from a variety of payment options, and rest assured donations are captured safely with PCI compliant forms. Create multiple versions of your standard donation form, or use Smart Lists to manage field options—such as school, program, or donation level—across multiple forms.
Within minutes, donors can receive a clear, concise, and personalized donation receipt straight to their inbox. Once this document automation is set, you can simply let it run in the background without any manual data entry or manipulation. Every time a donation form is submitted, the receipt generation will run automatically. If you rely on a CRM, like Salesforce, you could also set this donation receipt to generate using data from your CRM.
Automatically customize thank you letters using dynamic content pulled from the data in your donation form, and send to donors within a week of donation. Easily manage mailings with an integration like Lob, which can automate printing, mailing, and tracking of personalized donation letters. Donor documentation can be sent to external storage, or data can be stored in your CRM, giving donor engagement specialists easy access to documentation and donor records. At the close of the year, advanced data routing can be used to compile an end-of-year donor packet.
Whether your campus is small or large, managing maintenance requests across sites can become complicated and confusing without a strong process in place. Your facility and maintenance team already has a lot on their hands—simplify their workday with this streamlined system for service and maintenance requests. Easily track new requests, generate work orders, and receive sign-off when the work is complete.
Products: Forms · Documents · Sign
Features: Conditional Logic · Advanced Data Routing · Mobile Signing
Templates: Maintenance Request Form · Move In & Move Out Inspection Form
Optional Integrations: Airtable · Excel · ShareFile
Streamline campus maintenance by creating an accessible maintenance request form. Use Conditional Logic to ask questions based on a specific location, floor, or service request type. Add a file upload section to capture images of any damages and issues for reference. The form can be embedded on your website or student intranet or added to Portals for easy navigation. Students, staff, and faculty can easily fill out the mobile-friendly form from their laptop, tablet, or phone.
Use Approvals with the service form to ensure all data needed to process a work order is collected. If further details are needed, or the service request is invalid, the approver can deny the form submission or send back to the submitter for more details. Once approved, data from the form is routed into a work order document and sent to the maintenance team responsible for the identified school, dorm, or site.
Upon completion of the work, the maintenance team member can sign off on the work order. Formstack Sign’s multiple participant workflow will then automatically send the work order document to the service requestor for eSignature to confirm completion of the request. Automate text or email reminders to ensure the service requestor signs off on the document within a specific window of time. If an on-site inspection is necessary, the document can be signed in person by both parties from a mobile device.
Offering a seamless student application experience is crucial to converting prospective students into active ones. If you’re still reliant on paper processes or complicated application systems, you’re probably losing out on potential students. Simplify the process by offering a completely digital, mobile-friendly student enrollment, financial aid, and scholarship workflow to potential and current students. Your admissions team will love how simple, easy, and efficient this workflow is to build, manage, and edit.
Products: Forms · Documents · Sign
Features: Workflows · Portals · File Uploads · WCAG & Section 508 Compliance
Templates: Scholarship Application · College Application · Certificate
Optional Integrations: Dropbox · Trello · Google Cloud Print
If you’re transitioning from paper forms to digital, Formstack’s no-code, drag-and-drop form builder makes building forms quick and easy. Applications can be embedded on your website or added to your school’s Portal, which can serve as a hub to collect and store student data. Students can securely upload their information, resume, transcript, financial documentation, and letters of recommendation, all within one online form.
Pro Tip: Add Save and Resume to the form to allow students to build their application over time.
Once submitted, the student is sent a confirmation email, and Workflows routes the information to the financial aid and registrar offices for review. If data is found to be missing or inaccurate, the reviewer can send the form back to the student to edit or update. Sections can be assigned to various team members, allowing different departments to review the application at the same time. Steps in the workflow can be tracked in the Workspace, which minimizes bottlenecks and ensures the process flows smoothly.
Leslie shares how Augustana College uses Formstack to streamline work among professors, staff, students, and departments.
If the student is accepted and financial aid or scholarships are awarded, data from the form can be routed into an acceptance letter and certificate. To protect financial information and details, extra security can be added to your documentation to ensure it is sent securely. If signatures are needed from the student to accept their spot, financial aid, or scholarship, Formstack Sign is incredibly easy to use alongside Formstack Documents for streamlined eSignature collection.
If you’re ready to be less reliant on your IT team and more in control of your daily workflows, we have an interactive checklist that can help you choose the right no-code solution for your college or university. Click below to access and use this fillable resource to organize your thoughts, outline what you’re looking for in a solution, and prepare your team for implementation.
Collecting payments with online forms is easy, but first, you have to choose the right payment gateway. Browse the providers in our gateway credit card processing comparison chart to find the best option for your business. Then sign up for Formstack Forms, customize your payment forms, and start collecting profits in minutes.
NOTE: These amounts reflect the monthly subscription for the payment provider. Formstack does not charge a fee to integrate with any of our payment partners.
Are you struggling to take control of projects at work? Are you reliant on the IT team when you need to implement new systems? Are inadequate processes, outdated technology, or complicated tools slowing down your workday?
If you shook your head yes to any of the above questions, you are not alone. In our 2021 No-Code Economy Survey, respondents said a lack of technical resources results in 28% of employees getting held back on projects and/or initiatives. This same lack of resources leads to 59% of projects being sometimes or often delayed.
These are harrowing statistics for anyone in the field of higher education. With incredibly tight budgets, limited resources, and a market that gets more competitive each year, there’s no time to waste waiting on IT or dealing with inefficient processes. Luckily, a change in the higher education technology landscape is providing ways to break free from the common pitfalls holding colleges and universities back. What is driving this change? The rise of no-code software.
You may not understand no-code by the name alone, but chances are you’re already using tools and tech based around its concept. In the last year, many educational institutions have realized they can no longer function on the systems, processes, and tools they’ve always relied on.
Working through a worldwide pandemic proved how quickly technology can help reimagine the way work gets done. From eliminating physical interactions and paper workflows to transitioning to virtual meetings and events, the digital transformation we all knew was coming arrived well before many were ready to welcome it. No-code tools, apps, and platforms made it possible for colleges and universities across the world to keep up with the need for warp-speed digitization and innovation.
So what is no-code? And how can it transform workflows at your institution? This guide will help you better understand no-code and how it can be used in higher education. You’ll also get four examples of automation in education you can quickly and easily implement using Formstack’s no-code tools.
Is no-code a new term to you? You’re not alone. In fact, according to our survey, 82% of people are unfamiliar with no-code. If you search the term no-code in Google, you’ll discover many different definitions for the term, ranging from simple to complex. For this guide, we decided to develop our own definition of no-code:
“No-code is a type of software development that allows anyone to create digital applications without writing a single line of code. It involves using tools with an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface to create a unique solution to a problem. The resulting solution can take many forms—from building mobile, voice, or ecommerce apps and websites to automating any number of tasks or processes.”
No-code tools include software, systems, or products that allow users to build a solution without needing to know any code. These tools enable non-technical workers, in any department, to create the processes, products, and tools they need to get work done—without needing support from IT. They help organizations become more digitally agile, which makes it easier to edit, change, and adapt workflows with limited investment of time, money, and technical resources.
This type of software provides you a visual arena to build your process, usually with a drag-and-drop menu of options. From creating payment systems and registration processes to building scholarship workflows and paperless financial aid applications, no-code makes it extremely quick and easy to develop solutions to your most difficult problems.
Now more than ever, colleges and universities need to be able to quickly adapt to the ever-evolving digital world. The preferences and abilities of students are changing, and if your processes and systems don’t keep up, you will begin to see your recruitment and retention efforts fail.
Whether your school serves hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of students, they will all expect a digital-first experience. Creating the best student experience starts with your internal processes, efficiencies, and tools. Achieving your goals, regardless of department or role, depends greatly on having the right tools and processes in place.
No-code is on the brink of changing the way people work—from automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks to building entirely new processes, products, and applications in just days versus months. Investing in no-code tools at your school can enable workers of all technical levels to achieve great results with less time, money, resources, and infrastructure. Here’s how no-code tools can benefit every team across your campus, from student services and recruitment to HR and facilities.
When your IT team is stretched thin and serving several departments across your institution at once, it can be difficult to get in their queue. Yet many complicated software systems require coding, which means IT has to help get your projects off the ground.
With no-code, you no longer have to rely on your IT team to build, test, or launch new tools, apps, or workflows; employees of all technical skills can quickly learn how to use them on their own. Plus, you can easily make edits and adjustments and see them in real time.
Your IT team will be thankful when you approach them about adding no-code tools to your campus tech stack. By enabling your team or department to be more autonomous, IT can focus their time on the technical tasks that require their expertise and abilities.
As a higher education professional, your life revolves around semester schedules and tight deadlines. You don’t have time to waste when trying to develop a new project or improve an existing process.
While traditional software may require months to learn the system, onboard employees, and develop, no-code tools take nowhere near this time to implement. Many higher education institutions can get up and running with no-code tools in mere weeks. In fact, our survey revealed that 50% of people choose to use no-code tools because they are easier to use and faster to develop than traditional software.
When your next project requires a quick turnaround time, you’ll be ready. Whether it’s spinning up processes for alumni engagement or streamlining how departments collect, store, and share data, no-code tools can help you get from idea to solution much faster. Because many no-code tools easily integrate with common higher education systems, you’ll be able to connect them to the most important tools in your campus’s tech stack.
Whether you work on a small or large campus, most educational institutions face issues when trying to share data across departments and schools. From paper forms getting lost through the interdepartmental mail to inconsistencies with how data integrates across tools, it can be incredibly difficult to streamline cross-campus processes. This can create dangerous data silos that impact productivity and information management.
Working in silos leads to poor data management, inefficient systems, and loads of manual work. No-code tools can help minimize, and even eliminate, many of these issues. Because no-code software can be used by employees of all skill levels and technical knowledge, it can easily fit into any department’s tech stack. This enables you to rely on one tool to streamline processes and workflows across many departments. No more paperwork, manual data entry, or complicated systems to learn.
When you need to rely on others to get your work done, it can create huge bottlenecks that are mostly out of your control. From relying on IT to implement a tool or update an integration to awaiting approval from a manager or tracking down paperwork, there are plenty of roadblocks that can impact your productivity.
No-code software puts the power to build in your hands, allowing you to update a web page, digitize assets, create robust workflows, and collect data. With a tool like Formstack, you can oversee the entire workflow from start to finish, enabling you to see, adjust, and fix any issues or bottlenecks in real time.
With no-code tools, you can quickly adapt as the needs of students, staff, and faculty change without ever needing to submit a support ticket to IT. Easily automate many of your most tedious tasks, such as reminding deans about approvals, automating eSignature reminders to faculty, or sending students notifications upon completion of an application.
Higher education is full of antiquated systems and inefficient processes. Jake’s mission is to change this through no-code technology.
Still running your workflows on paper, in manual spreadsheets, or across multiple tools? It’s time to end these inefficient processes and upgrade your workflows to something better by using no-code workflow automation.
Formstack’s no-code technology can empower your team to achieve more in less time. From completing daily tasks to building brand new systems and processes, you can build the workflows you need without relying on IT or needing to know how to code.
We specialize in helping higher education institutions streamline their processes and take control of their data management across teams, departments, and schools. Here’s how to use Formstack to streamline some of the most common higher education workflows.
Building a strong alumni base is a crucial part to securing support and funding for your college or university. One way to keep alumni engaged is by hosting events. Easily gather the information you need from alumni, accept payments, generate tickets, automate emails to registered guests, and follow up with an event survey.
Products: Forms · Documents
Features: Conversion Kit · Email Confirmations and Notifications · Discount Codes
Templates: Alumni Event Registration Form · Event Ticket · Event Survey
Optional Integrations: Salesforce · PayPal · OneDrive
Alumni can quickly register for upcoming events online through a short registration form. Enable discount codes to allow for alumni discounts and embed your preferred payment processor to securely collect payments. Add Conversion Kit to your form to access important conversion data that can help you fine-tune your form for maximum registrations. Keep alumni engagement officers in the loop by using data routing to send them data as it is submitted.
Pro Tip: Asking for additional donations on your event registration page? You can automatically send donors a donation receipt for their records.
Connect your form to Formstack Documents to automatically generate event tickets for attendees. Easily update the ticket template to adhere to your school’s branding and event theme. Email newly generated tickets to attendees immediately, and store copies for your records in your CRM or cloud storage app.
When building your form, you can easily set up automated email notifications in just a few clicks. No need to export any lists or integrate with your email system. Send registrants a confirmation email upon registration, then set a reminder email to send the day before the event. You can also send an email the day after the event with a link to your event survey to collect important alumni feedback.
Empower your fundraising team or advancement department by creating a simple, streamlined donation process. Securely accept online donations with branded forms, and easily create donor documentation, receipts, and thank yous. Give your team more time to focus on donors by automating everything from donation collection and receipt production to personalized letters and donor follow-up.
Products: Forms · Documents
Features: Secure Online Payments · Automatic Document Generation · Dynamic Document Content
Templates: Donation Form · Donation Receipt · Welcome Letter
Optional Integrations: Stripe · SharePoint · Lob
Donors can quickly, easily, and securely submit donations to your school or foundation through a mobile-friendly online donation form. Choose from a variety of payment options, and rest assured donations are captured safely with PCI compliant forms. Create multiple versions of your standard donation form, or use Smart Lists to manage field options—such as school, program, or donation level—across multiple forms.
Within minutes, donors can receive a clear, concise, and personalized donation receipt straight to their inbox. Once this document automation is set, you can simply let it run in the background without any manual data entry or manipulation. Every time a donation form is submitted, the receipt generation will run automatically. If you rely on a CRM, like Salesforce, you could also set this donation receipt to generate using data from your CRM.
Automatically customize thank you letters using dynamic content pulled from the data in your donation form, and send to donors within a week of donation. Easily manage mailings with an integration like Lob, which can automate printing, mailing, and tracking of personalized donation letters. Donor documentation can be sent to external storage, or data can be stored in your CRM, giving donor engagement specialists easy access to documentation and donor records. At the close of the year, advanced data routing can be used to compile an end-of-year donor packet.
Whether your campus is small or large, managing maintenance requests across sites can become complicated and confusing without a strong process in place. Your facility and maintenance team already has a lot on their hands—simplify their workday with this streamlined system for service and maintenance requests. Easily track new requests, generate work orders, and receive sign-off when the work is complete.
Products: Forms · Documents · Sign
Features: Conditional Logic · Advanced Data Routing · Mobile Signing
Templates: Maintenance Request Form · Move In & Move Out Inspection Form
Optional Integrations: Airtable · Excel · ShareFile
Streamline campus maintenance by creating an accessible maintenance request form. Use Conditional Logic to ask questions based on a specific location, floor, or service request type. Add a file upload section to capture images of any damages and issues for reference. The form can be embedded on your website or student intranet or added to Portals for easy navigation. Students, staff, and faculty can easily fill out the mobile-friendly form from their laptop, tablet, or phone.
Use Approvals with the service form to ensure all data needed to process a work order is collected. If further details are needed, or the service request is invalid, the approver can deny the form submission or send back to the submitter for more details. Once approved, data from the form is routed into a work order document and sent to the maintenance team responsible for the identified school, dorm, or site.
Upon completion of the work, the maintenance team member can sign off on the work order. Formstack Sign’s multiple participant workflow will then automatically send the work order document to the service requestor for eSignature to confirm completion of the request. Automate text or email reminders to ensure the service requestor signs off on the document within a specific window of time. If an on-site inspection is necessary, the document can be signed in person by both parties from a mobile device.
Offering a seamless student application experience is crucial to converting prospective students into active ones. If you’re still reliant on paper processes or complicated application systems, you’re probably losing out on potential students. Simplify the process by offering a completely digital, mobile-friendly student enrollment, financial aid, and scholarship workflow to potential and current students. Your admissions team will love how simple, easy, and efficient this workflow is to build, manage, and edit.
Products: Forms · Documents · Sign
Features: Workflows · Portals · File Uploads · WCAG & Section 508 Compliance
Templates: Scholarship Application · College Application · Certificate
Optional Integrations: Dropbox · Trello · Google Cloud Print
If you’re transitioning from paper forms to digital, Formstack’s no-code, drag-and-drop form builder makes building forms quick and easy. Applications can be embedded on your website or added to your school’s Portal, which can serve as a hub to collect and store student data. Students can securely upload their information, resume, transcript, financial documentation, and letters of recommendation, all within one online form.
Pro Tip: Add Save and Resume to the form to allow students to build their application over time.
Once submitted, the student is sent a confirmation email, and Workflows routes the information to the financial aid and registrar offices for review. If data is found to be missing or inaccurate, the reviewer can send the form back to the student to edit or update. Sections can be assigned to various team members, allowing different departments to review the application at the same time. Steps in the workflow can be tracked in the Workspace, which minimizes bottlenecks and ensures the process flows smoothly.
Leslie shares how Augustana College uses Formstack to streamline work among professors, staff, students, and departments.
If the student is accepted and financial aid or scholarships are awarded, data from the form can be routed into an acceptance letter and certificate. To protect financial information and details, extra security can be added to your documentation to ensure it is sent securely. If signatures are needed from the student to accept their spot, financial aid, or scholarship, Formstack Sign is incredibly easy to use alongside Formstack Documents for streamlined eSignature collection.
If you’re ready to be less reliant on your IT team and more in control of your daily workflows, we have an interactive checklist that can help you choose the right no-code solution for your college or university. Click below to access and use this fillable resource to organize your thoughts, outline what you’re looking for in a solution, and prepare your team for implementation.
Are you struggling to take control of projects at work? Are you reliant on the IT team when you need to implement new systems? Are inadequate processes, outdated technology, or complicated tools slowing down your workday?
If you shook your head yes to any of the above questions, you are not alone. In our 2021 No-Code Economy Survey, respondents said a lack of technical resources results in 28% of employees getting held back on projects and/or initiatives. This same lack of resources leads to 59% of projects being sometimes or often delayed.
These are harrowing statistics for anyone in the field of higher education. With incredibly tight budgets, limited resources, and a market that gets more competitive each year, there’s no time to waste waiting on IT or dealing with inefficient processes. Luckily, a change in the higher education technology landscape is providing ways to break free from the common pitfalls holding colleges and universities back. What is driving this change? The rise of no-code software.
You may not understand no-code by the name alone, but chances are you’re already using tools and tech based around its concept. In the last year, many educational institutions have realized they can no longer function on the systems, processes, and tools they’ve always relied on.
Working through a worldwide pandemic proved how quickly technology can help reimagine the way work gets done. From eliminating physical interactions and paper workflows to transitioning to virtual meetings and events, the digital transformation we all knew was coming arrived well before many were ready to welcome it. No-code tools, apps, and platforms made it possible for colleges and universities across the world to keep up with the need for warp-speed digitization and innovation.
So what is no-code? And how can it transform workflows at your institution? This guide will help you better understand no-code and how it can be used in higher education. You’ll also get four examples of automation in education you can quickly and easily implement using Formstack’s no-code tools.
Is no-code a new term to you? You’re not alone. In fact, according to our survey, 82% of people are unfamiliar with no-code. If you search the term no-code in Google, you’ll discover many different definitions for the term, ranging from simple to complex. For this guide, we decided to develop our own definition of no-code:
“No-code is a type of software development that allows anyone to create digital applications without writing a single line of code. It involves using tools with an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface to create a unique solution to a problem. The resulting solution can take many forms—from building mobile, voice, or ecommerce apps and websites to automating any number of tasks or processes.”
No-code tools include software, systems, or products that allow users to build a solution without needing to know any code. These tools enable non-technical workers, in any department, to create the processes, products, and tools they need to get work done—without needing support from IT. They help organizations become more digitally agile, which makes it easier to edit, change, and adapt workflows with limited investment of time, money, and technical resources.
This type of software provides you a visual arena to build your process, usually with a drag-and-drop menu of options. From creating payment systems and registration processes to building scholarship workflows and paperless financial aid applications, no-code makes it extremely quick and easy to develop solutions to your most difficult problems.
Now more than ever, colleges and universities need to be able to quickly adapt to the ever-evolving digital world. The preferences and abilities of students are changing, and if your processes and systems don’t keep up, you will begin to see your recruitment and retention efforts fail.
Whether your school serves hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of students, they will all expect a digital-first experience. Creating the best student experience starts with your internal processes, efficiencies, and tools. Achieving your goals, regardless of department or role, depends greatly on having the right tools and processes in place.
No-code is on the brink of changing the way people work—from automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks to building entirely new processes, products, and applications in just days versus months. Investing in no-code tools at your school can enable workers of all technical levels to achieve great results with less time, money, resources, and infrastructure. Here’s how no-code tools can benefit every team across your campus, from student services and recruitment to HR and facilities.
When your IT team is stretched thin and serving several departments across your institution at once, it can be difficult to get in their queue. Yet many complicated software systems require coding, which means IT has to help get your projects off the ground.
With no-code, you no longer have to rely on your IT team to build, test, or launch new tools, apps, or workflows; employees of all technical skills can quickly learn how to use them on their own. Plus, you can easily make edits and adjustments and see them in real time.
Your IT team will be thankful when you approach them about adding no-code tools to your campus tech stack. By enabling your team or department to be more autonomous, IT can focus their time on the technical tasks that require their expertise and abilities.
As a higher education professional, your life revolves around semester schedules and tight deadlines. You don’t have time to waste when trying to develop a new project or improve an existing process.
While traditional software may require months to learn the system, onboard employees, and develop, no-code tools take nowhere near this time to implement. Many higher education institutions can get up and running with no-code tools in mere weeks. In fact, our survey revealed that 50% of people choose to use no-code tools because they are easier to use and faster to develop than traditional software.
When your next project requires a quick turnaround time, you’ll be ready. Whether it’s spinning up processes for alumni engagement or streamlining how departments collect, store, and share data, no-code tools can help you get from idea to solution much faster. Because many no-code tools easily integrate with common higher education systems, you’ll be able to connect them to the most important tools in your campus’s tech stack.
Whether you work on a small or large campus, most educational institutions face issues when trying to share data across departments and schools. From paper forms getting lost through the interdepartmental mail to inconsistencies with how data integrates across tools, it can be incredibly difficult to streamline cross-campus processes. This can create dangerous data silos that impact productivity and information management.
Working in silos leads to poor data management, inefficient systems, and loads of manual work. No-code tools can help minimize, and even eliminate, many of these issues. Because no-code software can be used by employees of all skill levels and technical knowledge, it can easily fit into any department’s tech stack. This enables you to rely on one tool to streamline processes and workflows across many departments. No more paperwork, manual data entry, or complicated systems to learn.
When you need to rely on others to get your work done, it can create huge bottlenecks that are mostly out of your control. From relying on IT to implement a tool or update an integration to awaiting approval from a manager or tracking down paperwork, there are plenty of roadblocks that can impact your productivity.
No-code software puts the power to build in your hands, allowing you to update a web page, digitize assets, create robust workflows, and collect data. With a tool like Formstack, you can oversee the entire workflow from start to finish, enabling you to see, adjust, and fix any issues or bottlenecks in real time.
With no-code tools, you can quickly adapt as the needs of students, staff, and faculty change without ever needing to submit a support ticket to IT. Easily automate many of your most tedious tasks, such as reminding deans about approvals, automating eSignature reminders to faculty, or sending students notifications upon completion of an application.
Higher education is full of antiquated systems and inefficient processes. Jake’s mission is to change this through no-code technology.
Still running your workflows on paper, in manual spreadsheets, or across multiple tools? It’s time to end these inefficient processes and upgrade your workflows to something better by using no-code workflow automation.
Formstack’s no-code technology can empower your team to achieve more in less time. From completing daily tasks to building brand new systems and processes, you can build the workflows you need without relying on IT or needing to know how to code.
We specialize in helping higher education institutions streamline their processes and take control of their data management across teams, departments, and schools. Here’s how to use Formstack to streamline some of the most common higher education workflows.
Building a strong alumni base is a crucial part to securing support and funding for your college or university. One way to keep alumni engaged is by hosting events. Easily gather the information you need from alumni, accept payments, generate tickets, automate emails to registered guests, and follow up with an event survey.
Products: Forms · Documents
Features: Conversion Kit · Email Confirmations and Notifications · Discount Codes
Templates: Alumni Event Registration Form · Event Ticket · Event Survey
Optional Integrations: Salesforce · PayPal · OneDrive
Alumni can quickly register for upcoming events online through a short registration form. Enable discount codes to allow for alumni discounts and embed your preferred payment processor to securely collect payments. Add Conversion Kit to your form to access important conversion data that can help you fine-tune your form for maximum registrations. Keep alumni engagement officers in the loop by using data routing to send them data as it is submitted.
Pro Tip: Asking for additional donations on your event registration page? You can automatically send donors a donation receipt for their records.
Connect your form to Formstack Documents to automatically generate event tickets for attendees. Easily update the ticket template to adhere to your school’s branding and event theme. Email newly generated tickets to attendees immediately, and store copies for your records in your CRM or cloud storage app.
When building your form, you can easily set up automated email notifications in just a few clicks. No need to export any lists or integrate with your email system. Send registrants a confirmation email upon registration, then set a reminder email to send the day before the event. You can also send an email the day after the event with a link to your event survey to collect important alumni feedback.
Empower your fundraising team or advancement department by creating a simple, streamlined donation process. Securely accept online donations with branded forms, and easily create donor documentation, receipts, and thank yous. Give your team more time to focus on donors by automating everything from donation collection and receipt production to personalized letters and donor follow-up.
Products: Forms · Documents
Features: Secure Online Payments · Automatic Document Generation · Dynamic Document Content
Templates: Donation Form · Donation Receipt · Welcome Letter
Optional Integrations: Stripe · SharePoint · Lob
Donors can quickly, easily, and securely submit donations to your school or foundation through a mobile-friendly online donation form. Choose from a variety of payment options, and rest assured donations are captured safely with PCI compliant forms. Create multiple versions of your standard donation form, or use Smart Lists to manage field options—such as school, program, or donation level—across multiple forms.
Within minutes, donors can receive a clear, concise, and personalized donation receipt straight to their inbox. Once this document automation is set, you can simply let it run in the background without any manual data entry or manipulation. Every time a donation form is submitted, the receipt generation will run automatically. If you rely on a CRM, like Salesforce, you could also set this donation receipt to generate using data from your CRM.
Automatically customize thank you letters using dynamic content pulled from the data in your donation form, and send to donors within a week of donation. Easily manage mailings with an integration like Lob, which can automate printing, mailing, and tracking of personalized donation letters. Donor documentation can be sent to external storage, or data can be stored in your CRM, giving donor engagement specialists easy access to documentation and donor records. At the close of the year, advanced data routing can be used to compile an end-of-year donor packet.
Whether your campus is small or large, managing maintenance requests across sites can become complicated and confusing without a strong process in place. Your facility and maintenance team already has a lot on their hands—simplify their workday with this streamlined system for service and maintenance requests. Easily track new requests, generate work orders, and receive sign-off when the work is complete.
Products: Forms · Documents · Sign
Features: Conditional Logic · Advanced Data Routing · Mobile Signing
Templates: Maintenance Request Form · Move In & Move Out Inspection Form
Optional Integrations: Airtable · Excel · ShareFile
Streamline campus maintenance by creating an accessible maintenance request form. Use Conditional Logic to ask questions based on a specific location, floor, or service request type. Add a file upload section to capture images of any damages and issues for reference. The form can be embedded on your website or student intranet or added to Portals for easy navigation. Students, staff, and faculty can easily fill out the mobile-friendly form from their laptop, tablet, or phone.
Use Approvals with the service form to ensure all data needed to process a work order is collected. If further details are needed, or the service request is invalid, the approver can deny the form submission or send back to the submitter for more details. Once approved, data from the form is routed into a work order document and sent to the maintenance team responsible for the identified school, dorm, or site.
Upon completion of the work, the maintenance team member can sign off on the work order. Formstack Sign’s multiple participant workflow will then automatically send the work order document to the service requestor for eSignature to confirm completion of the request. Automate text or email reminders to ensure the service requestor signs off on the document within a specific window of time. If an on-site inspection is necessary, the document can be signed in person by both parties from a mobile device.
Offering a seamless student application experience is crucial to converting prospective students into active ones. If you’re still reliant on paper processes or complicated application systems, you’re probably losing out on potential students. Simplify the process by offering a completely digital, mobile-friendly student enrollment, financial aid, and scholarship workflow to potential and current students. Your admissions team will love how simple, easy, and efficient this workflow is to build, manage, and edit.
Products: Forms · Documents · Sign
Features: Workflows · Portals · File Uploads · WCAG & Section 508 Compliance
Templates: Scholarship Application · College Application · Certificate
Optional Integrations: Dropbox · Trello · Google Cloud Print
If you’re transitioning from paper forms to digital, Formstack’s no-code, drag-and-drop form builder makes building forms quick and easy. Applications can be embedded on your website or added to your school’s Portal, which can serve as a hub to collect and store student data. Students can securely upload their information, resume, transcript, financial documentation, and letters of recommendation, all within one online form.
Pro Tip: Add Save and Resume to the form to allow students to build their application over time.
Once submitted, the student is sent a confirmation email, and Workflows routes the information to the financial aid and registrar offices for review. If data is found to be missing or inaccurate, the reviewer can send the form back to the student to edit or update. Sections can be assigned to various team members, allowing different departments to review the application at the same time. Steps in the workflow can be tracked in the Workspace, which minimizes bottlenecks and ensures the process flows smoothly.
Leslie shares how Augustana College uses Formstack to streamline work among professors, staff, students, and departments.
If the student is accepted and financial aid or scholarships are awarded, data from the form can be routed into an acceptance letter and certificate. To protect financial information and details, extra security can be added to your documentation to ensure it is sent securely. If signatures are needed from the student to accept their spot, financial aid, or scholarship, Formstack Sign is incredibly easy to use alongside Formstack Documents for streamlined eSignature collection.
If you’re ready to be less reliant on your IT team and more in control of your daily workflows, we have an interactive checklist that can help you choose the right no-code solution for your college or university. Click below to access and use this fillable resource to organize your thoughts, outline what you’re looking for in a solution, and prepare your team for implementation.
Are you struggling to take control of projects at work? Are you reliant on the IT team when you need to implement new systems? Are inadequate processes, outdated technology, or complicated tools slowing down your workday?
If you shook your head yes to any of the above questions, you are not alone. In our 2021 No-Code Economy Survey, respondents said a lack of technical resources results in 28% of employees getting held back on projects and/or initiatives. This same lack of resources leads to 59% of projects being sometimes or often delayed.
These are harrowing statistics for anyone in the field of higher education. With incredibly tight budgets, limited resources, and a market that gets more competitive each year, there’s no time to waste waiting on IT or dealing with inefficient processes. Luckily, a change in the higher education technology landscape is providing ways to break free from the common pitfalls holding colleges and universities back. What is driving this change? The rise of no-code software.
You may not understand no-code by the name alone, but chances are you’re already using tools and tech based around its concept. In the last year, many educational institutions have realized they can no longer function on the systems, processes, and tools they’ve always relied on.
Working through a worldwide pandemic proved how quickly technology can help reimagine the way work gets done. From eliminating physical interactions and paper workflows to transitioning to virtual meetings and events, the digital transformation we all knew was coming arrived well before many were ready to welcome it. No-code tools, apps, and platforms made it possible for colleges and universities across the world to keep up with the need for warp-speed digitization and innovation.
So what is no-code? And how can it transform workflows at your institution? This guide will help you better understand no-code and how it can be used in higher education. You’ll also get four examples of automation in education you can quickly and easily implement using Formstack’s no-code tools.
Is no-code a new term to you? You’re not alone. In fact, according to our survey, 82% of people are unfamiliar with no-code. If you search the term no-code in Google, you’ll discover many different definitions for the term, ranging from simple to complex. For this guide, we decided to develop our own definition of no-code:
“No-code is a type of software development that allows anyone to create digital applications without writing a single line of code. It involves using tools with an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface to create a unique solution to a problem. The resulting solution can take many forms—from building mobile, voice, or ecommerce apps and websites to automating any number of tasks or processes.”
No-code tools include software, systems, or products that allow users to build a solution without needing to know any code. These tools enable non-technical workers, in any department, to create the processes, products, and tools they need to get work done—without needing support from IT. They help organizations become more digitally agile, which makes it easier to edit, change, and adapt workflows with limited investment of time, money, and technical resources.
This type of software provides you a visual arena to build your process, usually with a drag-and-drop menu of options. From creating payment systems and registration processes to building scholarship workflows and paperless financial aid applications, no-code makes it extremely quick and easy to develop solutions to your most difficult problems.
Now more than ever, colleges and universities need to be able to quickly adapt to the ever-evolving digital world. The preferences and abilities of students are changing, and if your processes and systems don’t keep up, you will begin to see your recruitment and retention efforts fail.
Whether your school serves hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of students, they will all expect a digital-first experience. Creating the best student experience starts with your internal processes, efficiencies, and tools. Achieving your goals, regardless of department or role, depends greatly on having the right tools and processes in place.
No-code is on the brink of changing the way people work—from automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks to building entirely new processes, products, and applications in just days versus months. Investing in no-code tools at your school can enable workers of all technical levels to achieve great results with less time, money, resources, and infrastructure. Here’s how no-code tools can benefit every team across your campus, from student services and recruitment to HR and facilities.
When your IT team is stretched thin and serving several departments across your institution at once, it can be difficult to get in their queue. Yet many complicated software systems require coding, which means IT has to help get your projects off the ground.
With no-code, you no longer have to rely on your IT team to build, test, or launch new tools, apps, or workflows; employees of all technical skills can quickly learn how to use them on their own. Plus, you can easily make edits and adjustments and see them in real time.
Your IT team will be thankful when you approach them about adding no-code tools to your campus tech stack. By enabling your team or department to be more autonomous, IT can focus their time on the technical tasks that require their expertise and abilities.
As a higher education professional, your life revolves around semester schedules and tight deadlines. You don’t have time to waste when trying to develop a new project or improve an existing process.
While traditional software may require months to learn the system, onboard employees, and develop, no-code tools take nowhere near this time to implement. Many higher education institutions can get up and running with no-code tools in mere weeks. In fact, our survey revealed that 50% of people choose to use no-code tools because they are easier to use and faster to develop than traditional software.
When your next project requires a quick turnaround time, you’ll be ready. Whether it’s spinning up processes for alumni engagement or streamlining how departments collect, store, and share data, no-code tools can help you get from idea to solution much faster. Because many no-code tools easily integrate with common higher education systems, you’ll be able to connect them to the most important tools in your campus’s tech stack.
Whether you work on a small or large campus, most educational institutions face issues when trying to share data across departments and schools. From paper forms getting lost through the interdepartmental mail to inconsistencies with how data integrates across tools, it can be incredibly difficult to streamline cross-campus processes. This can create dangerous data silos that impact productivity and information management.
Working in silos leads to poor data management, inefficient systems, and loads of manual work. No-code tools can help minimize, and even eliminate, many of these issues. Because no-code software can be used by employees of all skill levels and technical knowledge, it can easily fit into any department’s tech stack. This enables you to rely on one tool to streamline processes and workflows across many departments. No more paperwork, manual data entry, or complicated systems to learn.
When you need to rely on others to get your work done, it can create huge bottlenecks that are mostly out of your control. From relying on IT to implement a tool or update an integration to awaiting approval from a manager or tracking down paperwork, there are plenty of roadblocks that can impact your productivity.
No-code software puts the power to build in your hands, allowing you to update a web page, digitize assets, create robust workflows, and collect data. With a tool like Formstack, you can oversee the entire workflow from start to finish, enabling you to see, adjust, and fix any issues or bottlenecks in real time.
With no-code tools, you can quickly adapt as the needs of students, staff, and faculty change without ever needing to submit a support ticket to IT. Easily automate many of your most tedious tasks, such as reminding deans about approvals, automating eSignature reminders to faculty, or sending students notifications upon completion of an application.
Higher education is full of antiquated systems and inefficient processes. Jake’s mission is to change this through no-code technology.
Still running your workflows on paper, in manual spreadsheets, or across multiple tools? It’s time to end these inefficient processes and upgrade your workflows to something better by using no-code workflow automation.
Formstack’s no-code technology can empower your team to achieve more in less time. From completing daily tasks to building brand new systems and processes, you can build the workflows you need without relying on IT or needing to know how to code.
We specialize in helping higher education institutions streamline their processes and take control of their data management across teams, departments, and schools. Here’s how to use Formstack to streamline some of the most common higher education workflows.
Building a strong alumni base is a crucial part to securing support and funding for your college or university. One way to keep alumni engaged is by hosting events. Easily gather the information you need from alumni, accept payments, generate tickets, automate emails to registered guests, and follow up with an event survey.
Products: Forms · Documents
Features: Conversion Kit · Email Confirmations and Notifications · Discount Codes
Templates: Alumni Event Registration Form · Event Ticket · Event Survey
Optional Integrations: Salesforce · PayPal · OneDrive
Alumni can quickly register for upcoming events online through a short registration form. Enable discount codes to allow for alumni discounts and embed your preferred payment processor to securely collect payments. Add Conversion Kit to your form to access important conversion data that can help you fine-tune your form for maximum registrations. Keep alumni engagement officers in the loop by using data routing to send them data as it is submitted.
Pro Tip: Asking for additional donations on your event registration page? You can automatically send donors a donation receipt for their records.
Connect your form to Formstack Documents to automatically generate event tickets for attendees. Easily update the ticket template to adhere to your school’s branding and event theme. Email newly generated tickets to attendees immediately, and store copies for your records in your CRM or cloud storage app.
When building your form, you can easily set up automated email notifications in just a few clicks. No need to export any lists or integrate with your email system. Send registrants a confirmation email upon registration, then set a reminder email to send the day before the event. You can also send an email the day after the event with a link to your event survey to collect important alumni feedback.
Empower your fundraising team or advancement department by creating a simple, streamlined donation process. Securely accept online donations with branded forms, and easily create donor documentation, receipts, and thank yous. Give your team more time to focus on donors by automating everything from donation collection and receipt production to personalized letters and donor follow-up.
Products: Forms · Documents
Features: Secure Online Payments · Automatic Document Generation · Dynamic Document Content
Templates: Donation Form · Donation Receipt · Welcome Letter
Optional Integrations: Stripe · SharePoint · Lob
Donors can quickly, easily, and securely submit donations to your school or foundation through a mobile-friendly online donation form. Choose from a variety of payment options, and rest assured donations are captured safely with PCI compliant forms. Create multiple versions of your standard donation form, or use Smart Lists to manage field options—such as school, program, or donation level—across multiple forms.
Within minutes, donors can receive a clear, concise, and personalized donation receipt straight to their inbox. Once this document automation is set, you can simply let it run in the background without any manual data entry or manipulation. Every time a donation form is submitted, the receipt generation will run automatically. If you rely on a CRM, like Salesforce, you could also set this donation receipt to generate using data from your CRM.
Automatically customize thank you letters using dynamic content pulled from the data in your donation form, and send to donors within a week of donation. Easily manage mailings with an integration like Lob, which can automate printing, mailing, and tracking of personalized donation letters. Donor documentation can be sent to external storage, or data can be stored in your CRM, giving donor engagement specialists easy access to documentation and donor records. At the close of the year, advanced data routing can be used to compile an end-of-year donor packet.
Whether your campus is small or large, managing maintenance requests across sites can become complicated and confusing without a strong process in place. Your facility and maintenance team already has a lot on their hands—simplify their workday with this streamlined system for service and maintenance requests. Easily track new requests, generate work orders, and receive sign-off when the work is complete.
Products: Forms · Documents · Sign
Features: Conditional Logic · Advanced Data Routing · Mobile Signing
Templates: Maintenance Request Form · Move In & Move Out Inspection Form
Optional Integrations: Airtable · Excel · ShareFile
Streamline campus maintenance by creating an accessible maintenance request form. Use Conditional Logic to ask questions based on a specific location, floor, or service request type. Add a file upload section to capture images of any damages and issues for reference. The form can be embedded on your website or student intranet or added to Portals for easy navigation. Students, staff, and faculty can easily fill out the mobile-friendly form from their laptop, tablet, or phone.
Use Approvals with the service form to ensure all data needed to process a work order is collected. If further details are needed, or the service request is invalid, the approver can deny the form submission or send back to the submitter for more details. Once approved, data from the form is routed into a work order document and sent to the maintenance team responsible for the identified school, dorm, or site.
Upon completion of the work, the maintenance team member can sign off on the work order. Formstack Sign’s multiple participant workflow will then automatically send the work order document to the service requestor for eSignature to confirm completion of the request. Automate text or email reminders to ensure the service requestor signs off on the document within a specific window of time. If an on-site inspection is necessary, the document can be signed in person by both parties from a mobile device.
Offering a seamless student application experience is crucial to converting prospective students into active ones. If you’re still reliant on paper processes or complicated application systems, you’re probably losing out on potential students. Simplify the process by offering a completely digital, mobile-friendly student enrollment, financial aid, and scholarship workflow to potential and current students. Your admissions team will love how simple, easy, and efficient this workflow is to build, manage, and edit.
Products: Forms · Documents · Sign
Features: Workflows · Portals · File Uploads · WCAG & Section 508 Compliance
Templates: Scholarship Application · College Application · Certificate
Optional Integrations: Dropbox · Trello · Google Cloud Print
If you’re transitioning from paper forms to digital, Formstack’s no-code, drag-and-drop form builder makes building forms quick and easy. Applications can be embedded on your website or added to your school’s Portal, which can serve as a hub to collect and store student data. Students can securely upload their information, resume, transcript, financial documentation, and letters of recommendation, all within one online form.
Pro Tip: Add Save and Resume to the form to allow students to build their application over time.
Once submitted, the student is sent a confirmation email, and Workflows routes the information to the financial aid and registrar offices for review. If data is found to be missing or inaccurate, the reviewer can send the form back to the student to edit or update. Sections can be assigned to various team members, allowing different departments to review the application at the same time. Steps in the workflow can be tracked in the Workspace, which minimizes bottlenecks and ensures the process flows smoothly.
Leslie shares how Augustana College uses Formstack to streamline work among professors, staff, students, and departments.
If the student is accepted and financial aid or scholarships are awarded, data from the form can be routed into an acceptance letter and certificate. To protect financial information and details, extra security can be added to your documentation to ensure it is sent securely. If signatures are needed from the student to accept their spot, financial aid, or scholarship, Formstack Sign is incredibly easy to use alongside Formstack Documents for streamlined eSignature collection.
If you’re ready to be less reliant on your IT team and more in control of your daily workflows, we have an interactive checklist that can help you choose the right no-code solution for your college or university. Click below to access and use this fillable resource to organize your thoughts, outline what you’re looking for in a solution, and prepare your team for implementation.
Are you struggling to take control of projects at work? Are you reliant on the IT team when you need to implement new systems? Are inadequate processes, outdated technology, or complicated tools slowing down your workday?
If you shook your head yes to any of the above questions, you are not alone. In our 2021 No-Code Economy Survey, respondents said a lack of technical resources results in 28% of employees getting held back on projects and/or initiatives. This same lack of resources leads to 59% of projects being sometimes or often delayed.
These are harrowing statistics for anyone in the field of higher education. With incredibly tight budgets, limited resources, and a market that gets more competitive each year, there’s no time to waste waiting on IT or dealing with inefficient processes. Luckily, a change in the higher education technology landscape is providing ways to break free from the common pitfalls holding colleges and universities back. What is driving this change? The rise of no-code software.
You may not understand no-code by the name alone, but chances are you’re already using tools and tech based around its concept. In the last year, many educational institutions have realized they can no longer function on the systems, processes, and tools they’ve always relied on.
Working through a worldwide pandemic proved how quickly technology can help reimagine the way work gets done. From eliminating physical interactions and paper workflows to transitioning to virtual meetings and events, the digital transformation we all knew was coming arrived well before many were ready to welcome it. No-code tools, apps, and platforms made it possible for colleges and universities across the world to keep up with the need for warp-speed digitization and innovation.
So what is no-code? And how can it transform workflows at your institution? This guide will help you better understand no-code and how it can be used in higher education. You’ll also get four examples of automation in education you can quickly and easily implement using Formstack’s no-code tools.
Is no-code a new term to you? You’re not alone. In fact, according to our survey, 82% of people are unfamiliar with no-code. If you search the term no-code in Google, you’ll discover many different definitions for the term, ranging from simple to complex. For this guide, we decided to develop our own definition of no-code:
“No-code is a type of software development that allows anyone to create digital applications without writing a single line of code. It involves using tools with an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface to create a unique solution to a problem. The resulting solution can take many forms—from building mobile, voice, or ecommerce apps and websites to automating any number of tasks or processes.”
No-code tools include software, systems, or products that allow users to build a solution without needing to know any code. These tools enable non-technical workers, in any department, to create the processes, products, and tools they need to get work done—without needing support from IT. They help organizations become more digitally agile, which makes it easier to edit, change, and adapt workflows with limited investment of time, money, and technical resources.
This type of software provides you a visual arena to build your process, usually with a drag-and-drop menu of options. From creating payment systems and registration processes to building scholarship workflows and paperless financial aid applications, no-code makes it extremely quick and easy to develop solutions to your most difficult problems.
Now more than ever, colleges and universities need to be able to quickly adapt to the ever-evolving digital world. The preferences and abilities of students are changing, and if your processes and systems don’t keep up, you will begin to see your recruitment and retention efforts fail.
Whether your school serves hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of students, they will all expect a digital-first experience. Creating the best student experience starts with your internal processes, efficiencies, and tools. Achieving your goals, regardless of department or role, depends greatly on having the right tools and processes in place.
No-code is on the brink of changing the way people work—from automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks to building entirely new processes, products, and applications in just days versus months. Investing in no-code tools at your school can enable workers of all technical levels to achieve great results with less time, money, resources, and infrastructure. Here’s how no-code tools can benefit every team across your campus, from student services and recruitment to HR and facilities.
When your IT team is stretched thin and serving several departments across your institution at once, it can be difficult to get in their queue. Yet many complicated software systems require coding, which means IT has to help get your projects off the ground.
With no-code, you no longer have to rely on your IT team to build, test, or launch new tools, apps, or workflows; employees of all technical skills can quickly learn how to use them on their own. Plus, you can easily make edits and adjustments and see them in real time.
Your IT team will be thankful when you approach them about adding no-code tools to your campus tech stack. By enabling your team or department to be more autonomous, IT can focus their time on the technical tasks that require their expertise and abilities.
As a higher education professional, your life revolves around semester schedules and tight deadlines. You don’t have time to waste when trying to develop a new project or improve an existing process.
While traditional software may require months to learn the system, onboard employees, and develop, no-code tools take nowhere near this time to implement. Many higher education institutions can get up and running with no-code tools in mere weeks. In fact, our survey revealed that 50% of people choose to use no-code tools because they are easier to use and faster to develop than traditional software.
When your next project requires a quick turnaround time, you’ll be ready. Whether it’s spinning up processes for alumni engagement or streamlining how departments collect, store, and share data, no-code tools can help you get from idea to solution much faster. Because many no-code tools easily integrate with common higher education systems, you’ll be able to connect them to the most important tools in your campus’s tech stack.
Whether you work on a small or large campus, most educational institutions face issues when trying to share data across departments and schools. From paper forms getting lost through the interdepartmental mail to inconsistencies with how data integrates across tools, it can be incredibly difficult to streamline cross-campus processes. This can create dangerous data silos that impact productivity and information management.
Working in silos leads to poor data management, inefficient systems, and loads of manual work. No-code tools can help minimize, and even eliminate, many of these issues. Because no-code software can be used by employees of all skill levels and technical knowledge, it can easily fit into any department’s tech stack. This enables you to rely on one tool to streamline processes and workflows across many departments. No more paperwork, manual data entry, or complicated systems to learn.
When you need to rely on others to get your work done, it can create huge bottlenecks that are mostly out of your control. From relying on IT to implement a tool or update an integration to awaiting approval from a manager or tracking down paperwork, there are plenty of roadblocks that can impact your productivity.
No-code software puts the power to build in your hands, allowing you to update a web page, digitize assets, create robust workflows, and collect data. With a tool like Formstack, you can oversee the entire workflow from start to finish, enabling you to see, adjust, and fix any issues or bottlenecks in real time.
With no-code tools, you can quickly adapt as the needs of students, staff, and faculty change without ever needing to submit a support ticket to IT. Easily automate many of your most tedious tasks, such as reminding deans about approvals, automating eSignature reminders to faculty, or sending students notifications upon completion of an application.
Higher education is full of antiquated systems and inefficient processes. Jake’s mission is to change this through no-code technology.
Still running your workflows on paper, in manual spreadsheets, or across multiple tools? It’s time to end these inefficient processes and upgrade your workflows to something better by using no-code workflow automation.
Formstack’s no-code technology can empower your team to achieve more in less time. From completing daily tasks to building brand new systems and processes, you can build the workflows you need without relying on IT or needing to know how to code.
We specialize in helping higher education institutions streamline their processes and take control of their data management across teams, departments, and schools. Here’s how to use Formstack to streamline some of the most common higher education workflows.
Building a strong alumni base is a crucial part to securing support and funding for your college or university. One way to keep alumni engaged is by hosting events. Easily gather the information you need from alumni, accept payments, generate tickets, automate emails to registered guests, and follow up with an event survey.
Products: Forms · Documents
Features: Conversion Kit · Email Confirmations and Notifications · Discount Codes
Templates: Alumni Event Registration Form · Event Ticket · Event Survey
Optional Integrations: Salesforce · PayPal · OneDrive
Alumni can quickly register for upcoming events online through a short registration form. Enable discount codes to allow for alumni discounts and embed your preferred payment processor to securely collect payments. Add Conversion Kit to your form to access important conversion data that can help you fine-tune your form for maximum registrations. Keep alumni engagement officers in the loop by using data routing to send them data as it is submitted.
Pro Tip: Asking for additional donations on your event registration page? You can automatically send donors a donation receipt for their records.
Connect your form to Formstack Documents to automatically generate event tickets for attendees. Easily update the ticket template to adhere to your school’s branding and event theme. Email newly generated tickets to attendees immediately, and store copies for your records in your CRM or cloud storage app.
When building your form, you can easily set up automated email notifications in just a few clicks. No need to export any lists or integrate with your email system. Send registrants a confirmation email upon registration, then set a reminder email to send the day before the event. You can also send an email the day after the event with a link to your event survey to collect important alumni feedback.
Empower your fundraising team or advancement department by creating a simple, streamlined donation process. Securely accept online donations with branded forms, and easily create donor documentation, receipts, and thank yous. Give your team more time to focus on donors by automating everything from donation collection and receipt production to personalized letters and donor follow-up.
Products: Forms · Documents
Features: Secure Online Payments · Automatic Document Generation · Dynamic Document Content
Templates: Donation Form · Donation Receipt · Welcome Letter
Optional Integrations: Stripe · SharePoint · Lob
Donors can quickly, easily, and securely submit donations to your school or foundation through a mobile-friendly online donation form. Choose from a variety of payment options, and rest assured donations are captured safely with PCI compliant forms. Create multiple versions of your standard donation form, or use Smart Lists to manage field options—such as school, program, or donation level—across multiple forms.
Within minutes, donors can receive a clear, concise, and personalized donation receipt straight to their inbox. Once this document automation is set, you can simply let it run in the background without any manual data entry or manipulation. Every time a donation form is submitted, the receipt generation will run automatically. If you rely on a CRM, like Salesforce, you could also set this donation receipt to generate using data from your CRM.
Automatically customize thank you letters using dynamic content pulled from the data in your donation form, and send to donors within a week of donation. Easily manage mailings with an integration like Lob, which can automate printing, mailing, and tracking of personalized donation letters. Donor documentation can be sent to external storage, or data can be stored in your CRM, giving donor engagement specialists easy access to documentation and donor records. At the close of the year, advanced data routing can be used to compile an end-of-year donor packet.
Whether your campus is small or large, managing maintenance requests across sites can become complicated and confusing without a strong process in place. Your facility and maintenance team already has a lot on their hands—simplify their workday with this streamlined system for service and maintenance requests. Easily track new requests, generate work orders, and receive sign-off when the work is complete.
Products: Forms · Documents · Sign
Features: Conditional Logic · Advanced Data Routing · Mobile Signing
Templates: Maintenance Request Form · Move In & Move Out Inspection Form
Optional Integrations: Airtable · Excel · ShareFile
Streamline campus maintenance by creating an accessible maintenance request form. Use Conditional Logic to ask questions based on a specific location, floor, or service request type. Add a file upload section to capture images of any damages and issues for reference. The form can be embedded on your website or student intranet or added to Portals for easy navigation. Students, staff, and faculty can easily fill out the mobile-friendly form from their laptop, tablet, or phone.
Use Approvals with the service form to ensure all data needed to process a work order is collected. If further details are needed, or the service request is invalid, the approver can deny the form submission or send back to the submitter for more details. Once approved, data from the form is routed into a work order document and sent to the maintenance team responsible for the identified school, dorm, or site.
Upon completion of the work, the maintenance team member can sign off on the work order. Formstack Sign’s multiple participant workflow will then automatically send the work order document to the service requestor for eSignature to confirm completion of the request. Automate text or email reminders to ensure the service requestor signs off on the document within a specific window of time. If an on-site inspection is necessary, the document can be signed in person by both parties from a mobile device.
Offering a seamless student application experience is crucial to converting prospective students into active ones. If you’re still reliant on paper processes or complicated application systems, you’re probably losing out on potential students. Simplify the process by offering a completely digital, mobile-friendly student enrollment, financial aid, and scholarship workflow to potential and current students. Your admissions team will love how simple, easy, and efficient this workflow is to build, manage, and edit.
Products: Forms · Documents · Sign
Features: Workflows · Portals · File Uploads · WCAG & Section 508 Compliance
Templates: Scholarship Application · College Application · Certificate
Optional Integrations: Dropbox · Trello · Google Cloud Print
If you’re transitioning from paper forms to digital, Formstack’s no-code, drag-and-drop form builder makes building forms quick and easy. Applications can be embedded on your website or added to your school’s Portal, which can serve as a hub to collect and store student data. Students can securely upload their information, resume, transcript, financial documentation, and letters of recommendation, all within one online form.
Pro Tip: Add Save and Resume to the form to allow students to build their application over time.
Once submitted, the student is sent a confirmation email, and Workflows routes the information to the financial aid and registrar offices for review. If data is found to be missing or inaccurate, the reviewer can send the form back to the student to edit or update. Sections can be assigned to various team members, allowing different departments to review the application at the same time. Steps in the workflow can be tracked in the Workspace, which minimizes bottlenecks and ensures the process flows smoothly.
Leslie shares how Augustana College uses Formstack to streamline work among professors, staff, students, and departments.
If the student is accepted and financial aid or scholarships are awarded, data from the form can be routed into an acceptance letter and certificate. To protect financial information and details, extra security can be added to your documentation to ensure it is sent securely. If signatures are needed from the student to accept their spot, financial aid, or scholarship, Formstack Sign is incredibly easy to use alongside Formstack Documents for streamlined eSignature collection.
If you’re ready to be less reliant on your IT team and more in control of your daily workflows, we have an interactive checklist that can help you choose the right no-code solution for your college or university. Click below to access and use this fillable resource to organize your thoughts, outline what you’re looking for in a solution, and prepare your team for implementation.
Are you struggling to take control of projects at work? Are you reliant on the IT team when you need to implement new systems? Are inadequate processes, outdated technology, or complicated tools slowing down your workday?
If you shook your head yes to any of the above questions, you are not alone. In our 2021 No-Code Economy Survey, respondents said a lack of technical resources results in 28% of employees getting held back on projects and/or initiatives. This same lack of resources leads to 59% of projects being sometimes or often delayed.
These are harrowing statistics for anyone in the field of higher education. With incredibly tight budgets, limited resources, and a market that gets more competitive each year, there’s no time to waste waiting on IT or dealing with inefficient processes. Luckily, a change in the higher education technology landscape is providing ways to break free from the common pitfalls holding colleges and universities back. What is driving this change? The rise of no-code software.
You may not understand no-code by the name alone, but chances are you’re already using tools and tech based around its concept. In the last year, many educational institutions have realized they can no longer function on the systems, processes, and tools they’ve always relied on.
Working through a worldwide pandemic proved how quickly technology can help reimagine the way work gets done. From eliminating physical interactions and paper workflows to transitioning to virtual meetings and events, the digital transformation we all knew was coming arrived well before many were ready to welcome it. No-code tools, apps, and platforms made it possible for colleges and universities across the world to keep up with the need for warp-speed digitization and innovation.
So what is no-code? And how can it transform workflows at your institution? This guide will help you better understand no-code and how it can be used in higher education. You’ll also get four examples of automation in education you can quickly and easily implement using Formstack’s no-code tools.
Is no-code a new term to you? You’re not alone. In fact, according to our survey, 82% of people are unfamiliar with no-code. If you search the term no-code in Google, you’ll discover many different definitions for the term, ranging from simple to complex. For this guide, we decided to develop our own definition of no-code:
“No-code is a type of software development that allows anyone to create digital applications without writing a single line of code. It involves using tools with an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface to create a unique solution to a problem. The resulting solution can take many forms—from building mobile, voice, or ecommerce apps and websites to automating any number of tasks or processes.”
No-code tools include software, systems, or products that allow users to build a solution without needing to know any code. These tools enable non-technical workers, in any department, to create the processes, products, and tools they need to get work done—without needing support from IT. They help organizations become more digitally agile, which makes it easier to edit, change, and adapt workflows with limited investment of time, money, and technical resources.
This type of software provides you a visual arena to build your process, usually with a drag-and-drop menu of options. From creating payment systems and registration processes to building scholarship workflows and paperless financial aid applications, no-code makes it extremely quick and easy to develop solutions to your most difficult problems.
Now more than ever, colleges and universities need to be able to quickly adapt to the ever-evolving digital world. The preferences and abilities of students are changing, and if your processes and systems don’t keep up, you will begin to see your recruitment and retention efforts fail.
Whether your school serves hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of students, they will all expect a digital-first experience. Creating the best student experience starts with your internal processes, efficiencies, and tools. Achieving your goals, regardless of department or role, depends greatly on having the right tools and processes in place.
No-code is on the brink of changing the way people work—from automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks to building entirely new processes, products, and applications in just days versus months. Investing in no-code tools at your school can enable workers of all technical levels to achieve great results with less time, money, resources, and infrastructure. Here’s how no-code tools can benefit every team across your campus, from student services and recruitment to HR and facilities.
When your IT team is stretched thin and serving several departments across your institution at once, it can be difficult to get in their queue. Yet many complicated software systems require coding, which means IT has to help get your projects off the ground.
With no-code, you no longer have to rely on your IT team to build, test, or launch new tools, apps, or workflows; employees of all technical skills can quickly learn how to use them on their own. Plus, you can easily make edits and adjustments and see them in real time.
Your IT team will be thankful when you approach them about adding no-code tools to your campus tech stack. By enabling your team or department to be more autonomous, IT can focus their time on the technical tasks that require their expertise and abilities.
As a higher education professional, your life revolves around semester schedules and tight deadlines. You don’t have time to waste when trying to develop a new project or improve an existing process.
While traditional software may require months to learn the system, onboard employees, and develop, no-code tools take nowhere near this time to implement. Many higher education institutions can get up and running with no-code tools in mere weeks. In fact, our survey revealed that 50% of people choose to use no-code tools because they are easier to use and faster to develop than traditional software.
When your next project requires a quick turnaround time, you’ll be ready. Whether it’s spinning up processes for alumni engagement or streamlining how departments collect, store, and share data, no-code tools can help you get from idea to solution much faster. Because many no-code tools easily integrate with common higher education systems, you’ll be able to connect them to the most important tools in your campus’s tech stack.
Whether you work on a small or large campus, most educational institutions face issues when trying to share data across departments and schools. From paper forms getting lost through the interdepartmental mail to inconsistencies with how data integrates across tools, it can be incredibly difficult to streamline cross-campus processes. This can create dangerous data silos that impact productivity and information management.
Working in silos leads to poor data management, inefficient systems, and loads of manual work. No-code tools can help minimize, and even eliminate, many of these issues. Because no-code software can be used by employees of all skill levels and technical knowledge, it can easily fit into any department’s tech stack. This enables you to rely on one tool to streamline processes and workflows across many departments. No more paperwork, manual data entry, or complicated systems to learn.
When you need to rely on others to get your work done, it can create huge bottlenecks that are mostly out of your control. From relying on IT to implement a tool or update an integration to awaiting approval from a manager or tracking down paperwork, there are plenty of roadblocks that can impact your productivity.
No-code software puts the power to build in your hands, allowing you to update a web page, digitize assets, create robust workflows, and collect data. With a tool like Formstack, you can oversee the entire workflow from start to finish, enabling you to see, adjust, and fix any issues or bottlenecks in real time.
With no-code tools, you can quickly adapt as the needs of students, staff, and faculty change without ever needing to submit a support ticket to IT. Easily automate many of your most tedious tasks, such as reminding deans about approvals, automating eSignature reminders to faculty, or sending students notifications upon completion of an application.
Higher education is full of antiquated systems and inefficient processes. Jake’s mission is to change this through no-code technology.
Still running your workflows on paper, in manual spreadsheets, or across multiple tools? It’s time to end these inefficient processes and upgrade your workflows to something better by using no-code workflow automation.
Formstack’s no-code technology can empower your team to achieve more in less time. From completing daily tasks to building brand new systems and processes, you can build the workflows you need without relying on IT or needing to know how to code.
We specialize in helping higher education institutions streamline their processes and take control of their data management across teams, departments, and schools. Here’s how to use Formstack to streamline some of the most common higher education workflows.
Building a strong alumni base is a crucial part to securing support and funding for your college or university. One way to keep alumni engaged is by hosting events. Easily gather the information you need from alumni, accept payments, generate tickets, automate emails to registered guests, and follow up with an event survey.
Products: Forms · Documents
Features: Conversion Kit · Email Confirmations and Notifications · Discount Codes
Templates: Alumni Event Registration Form · Event Ticket · Event Survey
Optional Integrations: Salesforce · PayPal · OneDrive
Alumni can quickly register for upcoming events online through a short registration form. Enable discount codes to allow for alumni discounts and embed your preferred payment processor to securely collect payments. Add Conversion Kit to your form to access important conversion data that can help you fine-tune your form for maximum registrations. Keep alumni engagement officers in the loop by using data routing to send them data as it is submitted.
Pro Tip: Asking for additional donations on your event registration page? You can automatically send donors a donation receipt for their records.
Connect your form to Formstack Documents to automatically generate event tickets for attendees. Easily update the ticket template to adhere to your school’s branding and event theme. Email newly generated tickets to attendees immediately, and store copies for your records in your CRM or cloud storage app.
When building your form, you can easily set up automated email notifications in just a few clicks. No need to export any lists or integrate with your email system. Send registrants a confirmation email upon registration, then set a reminder email to send the day before the event. You can also send an email the day after the event with a link to your event survey to collect important alumni feedback.
Empower your fundraising team or advancement department by creating a simple, streamlined donation process. Securely accept online donations with branded forms, and easily create donor documentation, receipts, and thank yous. Give your team more time to focus on donors by automating everything from donation collection and receipt production to personalized letters and donor follow-up.
Products: Forms · Documents
Features: Secure Online Payments · Automatic Document Generation · Dynamic Document Content
Templates: Donation Form · Donation Receipt · Welcome Letter
Optional Integrations: Stripe · SharePoint · Lob
Donors can quickly, easily, and securely submit donations to your school or foundation through a mobile-friendly online donation form. Choose from a variety of payment options, and rest assured donations are captured safely with PCI compliant forms. Create multiple versions of your standard donation form, or use Smart Lists to manage field options—such as school, program, or donation level—across multiple forms.
Within minutes, donors can receive a clear, concise, and personalized donation receipt straight to their inbox. Once this document automation is set, you can simply let it run in the background without any manual data entry or manipulation. Every time a donation form is submitted, the receipt generation will run automatically. If you rely on a CRM, like Salesforce, you could also set this donation receipt to generate using data from your CRM.
Automatically customize thank you letters using dynamic content pulled from the data in your donation form, and send to donors within a week of donation. Easily manage mailings with an integration like Lob, which can automate printing, mailing, and tracking of personalized donation letters. Donor documentation can be sent to external storage, or data can be stored in your CRM, giving donor engagement specialists easy access to documentation and donor records. At the close of the year, advanced data routing can be used to compile an end-of-year donor packet.
Whether your campus is small or large, managing maintenance requests across sites can become complicated and confusing without a strong process in place. Your facility and maintenance team already has a lot on their hands—simplify their workday with this streamlined system for service and maintenance requests. Easily track new requests, generate work orders, and receive sign-off when the work is complete.
Products: Forms · Documents · Sign
Features: Conditional Logic · Advanced Data Routing · Mobile Signing
Templates: Maintenance Request Form · Move In & Move Out Inspection Form
Optional Integrations: Airtable · Excel · ShareFile
Streamline campus maintenance by creating an accessible maintenance request form. Use Conditional Logic to ask questions based on a specific location, floor, or service request type. Add a file upload section to capture images of any damages and issues for reference. The form can be embedded on your website or student intranet or added to Portals for easy navigation. Students, staff, and faculty can easily fill out the mobile-friendly form from their laptop, tablet, or phone.
Use Approvals with the service form to ensure all data needed to process a work order is collected. If further details are needed, or the service request is invalid, the approver can deny the form submission or send back to the submitter for more details. Once approved, data from the form is routed into a work order document and sent to the maintenance team responsible for the identified school, dorm, or site.
Upon completion of the work, the maintenance team member can sign off on the work order. Formstack Sign’s multiple participant workflow will then automatically send the work order document to the service requestor for eSignature to confirm completion of the request. Automate text or email reminders to ensure the service requestor signs off on the document within a specific window of time. If an on-site inspection is necessary, the document can be signed in person by both parties from a mobile device.
Offering a seamless student application experience is crucial to converting prospective students into active ones. If you’re still reliant on paper processes or complicated application systems, you’re probably losing out on potential students. Simplify the process by offering a completely digital, mobile-friendly student enrollment, financial aid, and scholarship workflow to potential and current students. Your admissions team will love how simple, easy, and efficient this workflow is to build, manage, and edit.
Products: Forms · Documents · Sign
Features: Workflows · Portals · File Uploads · WCAG & Section 508 Compliance
Templates: Scholarship Application · College Application · Certificate
Optional Integrations: Dropbox · Trello · Google Cloud Print
If you’re transitioning from paper forms to digital, Formstack’s no-code, drag-and-drop form builder makes building forms quick and easy. Applications can be embedded on your website or added to your school’s Portal, which can serve as a hub to collect and store student data. Students can securely upload their information, resume, transcript, financial documentation, and letters of recommendation, all within one online form.
Pro Tip: Add Save and Resume to the form to allow students to build their application over time.
Once submitted, the student is sent a confirmation email, and Workflows routes the information to the financial aid and registrar offices for review. If data is found to be missing or inaccurate, the reviewer can send the form back to the student to edit or update. Sections can be assigned to various team members, allowing different departments to review the application at the same time. Steps in the workflow can be tracked in the Workspace, which minimizes bottlenecks and ensures the process flows smoothly.
Leslie shares how Augustana College uses Formstack to streamline work among professors, staff, students, and departments.
If the student is accepted and financial aid or scholarships are awarded, data from the form can be routed into an acceptance letter and certificate. To protect financial information and details, extra security can be added to your documentation to ensure it is sent securely. If signatures are needed from the student to accept their spot, financial aid, or scholarship, Formstack Sign is incredibly easy to use alongside Formstack Documents for streamlined eSignature collection.
If you’re ready to be less reliant on your IT team and more in control of your daily workflows, we have an interactive checklist that can help you choose the right no-code solution for your college or university. Click below to access and use this fillable resource to organize your thoughts, outline what you’re looking for in a solution, and prepare your team for implementation.
