American Exchange Project Grows Student Participation 2400%

80%

reduction in time spent on manual tasks.

$9k

saved annually by eliminating DocuSign.

500+

participating exchange students annually.

Overview

The American Exchange Project, a nonprofit offering high school exchange trips throughout the U.S., wanted to grow its national student program. However, the nonprofit was losing trust and valuable data by relying on disconnected web form tools that felt unprofessional and spammy to participants. Switching to secure, Salesforce-integrated digital forms with FormAssembly helped build trust and automate workflows, saving thousands annually and increasing student participation from 20 to over 500 (a 2400% increase) in just a few years.

Forms that left a bad impression

Challenge

The American Exchange Project (AEP) previously used Google Forms and a Zapier integration with Salesforce to collect data from students, families, and hosts. Staff spent at least one hour a day troubleshooting form limitations and manually retrieving, fixing, or adding data to Salesforce whenever the Zapier integration malfunctioned (which happened frequently). Students also reported that the web form submission experience felt unprofessional, resulting in a lack of trust and concerns over data security.

“FormAssembly has definitely been a big time saver. I do a lot less management now than I used to.”

Zoë Loza

Director of Technology

Professionally-branded web forms

Solution

AEP implemented FormAssembly’s data collection platform to give students a more trustworthy, streamlined digital experience while saving substantial time and hassle for staff. Moving to secure web forms that integrated directly with Salesforce solved several problems. FormAssembly’s bi-directional Salesforce Connector allows staff to easily push and pull data from Salesforce, with updates in Salesforce automatically updated to their forms.

This eliminated the need for staff to manually retrieve data from Google Forms and unreliable integration tools, which helped improve data quality, streamline workflows, and reduce time spent on manual data tasks by 80%. FormAssembly’s e-Signature capabilities also allowed AEP to cancel DocuSign, saving them $9,000 a year in subscription fees while providing a secure way to collect student waivers within the same platform.

80%

reduction in time spent on manual tasks.

$9k

saved annually by eliminating DocuSign.

500+

participating exchange students annually.

Salesforce connector

The integration — which automatically pushes and pulls data between web forms and Salesforce — allowed the team to eliminate manual data changes with Google Forms and improved respondent experiences.

Conditional logic

The host family interest form includes a checkbox that triggers additional questions if the parent has a student who is participating in AEP.

Hidden fields

If a parent has a student in AEP and checks the box on a form, additional fields will pop up with clarifying questions. If the box is not checked off, these additional fields will remain hidden.

Lookup fields

Students can easily search and select their high school from a drop-down list of predefined options on the interest form. This speeds up the sign-up process and improves data quality for staff.

Prefill connector

Students who already submitted their personal and contact information in an interest form don’t have to repeat inputting this data on future forms.

Workflow

AEP uses a workflow to automate its data collection processes, from the initial interest form to the official sign-up form and the waiver form.