Student Life processes hundreds of thousands of campers each year; airSlate completely changed the way they do it
Student Life camps have been a source of inspiring, educational, faith-based events for decades. Thousands of young people join their camps on 60 campuses on an annual basis. Keeping track of campuses, attendees, and their respective paperwork is no small task.
In 2021, Danielle Sullivan, Property Specialist at Student Life, began using signNow to digitize the forms approval process and in 2022 expanded into airSlate.
We spoke to Danielle to learn more about how using signNow and airSlate has changed the way the Student Life camps are managed.
Lots of campers translates to lots of paperwork
When it comes to anything involving minors, safety and security are of the utmost concern. An emphasis on safety usually requires plenty of forms and documents to be signed. This is certainly the case at Student Life.
Danielle explained that all group leaders must sign a form confirming that background checks have been completed. Furthermore, every participant has a stack of permission slips and waivers to sign, which require a notary.
With thousands and thousands of kids making their way through Student Life camps, this abundance of paperwork can present problems, such as handwriting being illegible and forms being incomplete or misplaced.
“Our legal team eventually gave us the go ahead to move to digital signatures. The team at signNow helped make sure we had the right checks and balances in place and that this process would work for us.”
– Danielle Sullivan, Property Specialist at Student Life
Upon implementing signNow, the improvement was immediate. The Student Life team started receiving legible, error-free, completed forms that they got via email and could store right onto their internal systems. It simply worked.
Given the number of forms the Student Life team processes, they soon realized they could benefit from using airSlate as well.
How workflow automation has been a significant problem-solver
Less than a year into using airSlate, the Student Life team has saved plenty of time and become much more efficient.
“Let’s say there’s an injury on one of our campuses,” says Danielle. “With airSlate, we can quickly find the form we need and get it to everyone who needs it – the hospital, group leader, legal team, leadership team, and so on. Plus, we can do that in one email instead of having to dig through paper forms, find the right one, scan it, save the file, then send it off. We can react with a true sense of urgency.”
One problem that Student Life has contended with is that in any given summer, there could be 100,000 students dispersed across 60 campuses. It hasn’t always been easy to automatically keep track of who goes where.
“My favorite thing about airSlate so far is that when we export data to an Excel sheet, we’re able to filter by specific camp location,” says Danielle. “With thousands of attendees, it helps us tremendously to be able to filter this way.”
Now, anyone on the Student Life team can quickly open up a shared spreadsheet, filter by campus, find the respective student, and see important information such as whether or not all their forms have been completed.
Taking it one step further, airSlate’s automation capabilities will automatically create folders per campus and group forms into their appropriate folders. As a result, staying organized has become much more efficient and productive.
Taking advantage of airSlate’s bots has been important for Danielle and her team.
“We use a decent number of bots, like the prefill to populate church information,” says Danielle. “Discovering the bot that lets you change a Slate name was a game-changer for us. It was really hard to find a specific person in our database before we got that bot on there. Now, we’re able to quickly and easily get the information we need and have the confidence that it’s the absolutely correct person we were searching for.”
A bonus to automation: working with great people
We asked Danielle to summarize her experience with airSlate in one word. Her answer: impressive.
“Whenever we’ve run across a bug or issue, we’ve gotten an immediate response from our airSlate support team,” says Danielle. “It has never felt like we are being ignored. It feels good to have this level of customer service. It has been so unexpected.”
Danielle can tell that the airSlate product is constantly being improved, and she finds it exciting that customers are truly being listened to. Because of that, she’s keen on spreading the word about airSlate.
“I’ve already recommended airSlate to a bunch of organizations,” says Danielle. “You have been fabulous to work with every step of the way. I am very thankful for the coaching I’ve gotten and I feel confident that airSlate has what we need to keep our people’s information confidential and secure.”
