How COTSA Collects and Streamlines Competition Entries with Formplus

“…Our mission is to provide personal development, leadership, and career opportunities in STEM, whereby members apply and integrate these concepts through intracurricular activities, competitions, and related programs. We are preparing these students in STEM/Arts/IT to become leaders in an ever-increasingly technical world.”

This is what Tony Raymond, the State Advisor for the Colorado Technology Student Association (COTSA) had to explain about their mission as an association.

COTSA is the state affiliate of the Technology Student Association (TSA) and has been existence since 1986.

Their mission: to foster personal growth, leadership, and opportunities in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM). Currently, they have nearly 3,000 members in more than 75 chapters around the state of Colorado.

For our latest Formplus case study, we had a chat with Tony on their mission and how the Formplus form builder has been able to help them with data collection.

What goes on at COTSA?

COTSA is a career and technical student organization, that is, it exists as a professional/ technical association for students in the STEM/Arts/IT areas. As an organization, they provide professional development for students as well as offer opportunities for students to compete in wide range of competitions.

These competitions range from extemporaneous speaking to robotics, graphic arts, video production, and a lot more — there are more than 100 different contests at both the middle and high school levels in which students participate. Each year, COTSA hosts several conferences — a fall leadership conference (where students learn what kinds of leaders they are and how to lead others), as well as a state conference.

At the state conference, Tony says, “students compete in with other students from across the state. Some of the events are considered “early submit” — meaning they are turned in before the conference — like videos or documentation-only events. For those, Formplus is what we use to collect the urls and the documentation.”

This conference eventually receives entries from more than 1,600 participants and each entry has to be properly combed through to determine authenticity and eligibility.

Life Before Formplus

“We needed a way to collect URLS and documents for our early submission events in advance of our conference. We were using Google forms to do the task, but by itself, it was clunky. Then we found Formplus which works with Google Sheets and we had our solution.”

Just like Performance Equipment, COTSA used a Google form to collect submissions, but it wasn’t enough — they needed a simple form builder. That was when they decided to explore other online form builders.

“We did look at other systems like WuFoo, but they were cost prohibitive for us,” Tony says. “Formplus was more reasonable as far as cost, was easy for us to use, and it still allowed us the ‘backend’ of Google Forms.”

FYI, by backend of Google forms, Tony means, Formplus’ native integration with Google Sheets and Google Drive.

Formplus and productivity at COTSA

According to Tony, COTSA has gone completely digital with the use of online competition forms, particularly Formplus forms.

“The Formplus tool has made collection of URLs and forms WAY easier! And it allows us to be all digital,” he says. “Before we went online with this, we would have to literally collect thousands of pieces of paper for each conference. Now, through Formplus we can collect the data digitally and store it that way — nothing ever needs to be printed out.”

They also use a variety of software, including Microsoft Office, Google Docs/Sheets, HelloCrowd and then WordPress for their website.

Of all those tools, Formplus integrates well with Google Docs, Sheets, Drive and WordPress. Our OneDrive integration is in the pipeline and will be released really soon.

Here’s a list of their favourite Formplus features and how they have been able to find it useful:

• Multiple unlimited forms: seeing that the COTSA state conference has a number of contests with different categories/segments, Tony needed to create multiple forms for all the important categories. With Formplus, you are not restricted to a particular number of forms per account i.e. you get to create unlimited forms.
• Ease of use with Google apps: Tony highlighted the fact that they could receive submissions directly in Google sheets and that Formplus forms could pass files directly into their Google drive storage.
• Set a confirmation email for submitted responses: Rather than reply each applicant after a submission, confirmation emails can be customized to be sent out once a form is submitted.
• Set form deadline: Seeing that they were using forms to receive submissions for contests and conferences, the COTSA team has found the ‘Set form deadline’ feature to be very useful. With it, forms can automatically close once the deadline is due or has expired.
• Simple form design: In Tony’s words, they needed “to design a less clunky interface” for their users and the simplicity that Formplus gives worked well for them.
• Forms with CAPTCHA: Formplus forms can be made secure with CAPTCHA and so they like the fact that they can easily create secure forms with CAPTCHA, to prevent spammers and bots.

In all, COTSA has shown us how easy to use an online form builder like Formplus to make your data collection process a lot easier. Forms do really make their world go round.

This could also be the start of how you increased your team productivity with online forms. Sign up now for a free Formplus trial to check out all our super cool features.