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During a recent Peer Spotlight webinar, Dr. Charlotte Forstall, Program Manager at Washington University in St. Louis's Research Development Office, discussed her use of the Form Designer template with InfoReady's Carlos Moncada.
Charlotte: The centralized Research Development Office at WashU supports faculty from all schools, including the growing Here & Next Seed Funds initiative. Like many research institutions, there's desire to de-silo to have lots of innovative, interdisciplinary collaboration between various schools. As an administrator, it can be difficult to see those processes through when you've got different units doing things in different ways. One of my goals is to put together as transparent and fair of a process as possible with as much information as widely available as possible for the programs that I myself am running. InfoReady has a big role in helping me do that.
Carlos: What specific features and functionality did you enable in the form designer that you felt were most beneficial?
Charlotte: It is so much simpler for people who are filling out the application to be able to add a co-applicant in the new Form Designer than it was in the legacy template, because it just automatically will populate. You want to add someone else, go ahead, put that in, too, which makes things a lot clearer.
The whole question of logic questions comes into play, too. We have several tracks, each with their own InfoReady competitions. But we also have within our research excellence program different pillars like environmental research, public health, digital transformation that the grants should be associated with. So using conditional logic questions by first selecting what their research excellence priority area is, I can develop further questions based on that selection, which is hugely helpful to both myself and to the applicants. And it permits us to track the interest we're having for different programs in those areas that I don't know would have been as easy or straightforward with the legacy template.
I like that we have page views now, so I can do all of the demographic questions, all of the proposal-specific questions, and then all of the uploads. It lets everything be very concise. I feel like it matches more of what their expectations are as applicants based on other systems that they're using.
Carlos: How else are you using Form Designer's conditional logic?
Charlotte: Truthfully, I feel like the place that it's going to be the most helpful for me is going to be on the progress reporting side of things, where I might have questions about, has your grant work caused you to collaborate with more individuals, external from the university? Yes or no? With conditional logic, I can populate the questions on the Progress Report based on what's actually happening so they don't get overwhelmed with questions that aren't a part of their project design. I think that for me, the Form Designer on the reporting is going to be even more valuable. It's valuable in the application process, but it's going to be mind-blowing, I think, in the reporting. The conditional logic is, I think, going to be really a game changer letting the reporting be as easy a process as possible based on what people's individual projects are.
Carlos: Release 3.62 includes a new feature for progress reports where you can assign delegates to a Progress Report. So the co-PIs, the co-applicants, whomever, they can assign someone to help fill it out. If you're using form design or you can take advantage of it
Charlotte: I will 1,000 % be utilizing that because I've already gotten questions from people whose projects are over a year out. How am I going to fill this out? My PI doesn't do that. Right now, your PI is responsible, but now I will get to tell them they can assign it to someone else.
This is the thing I was talking about earlier. I would be like, 'it would be really great if we could do this'. Then InfoReady has consistently been responsive to those kinds of needs. It's often been the case where I've been like, It would be really great if we could do this. And then you'll pop in and give me this, Well, here you go. It's launching tomorrow. This is not the first time that that's happened. So amazing.
Carlos: What was the most surprising feature and unforeseen benefit of switching your process to InfoReady?
Charlotte: I have found the time that I've gotten back from only having one place to go to really be the winner here with that. Everything is in one spot. I have found it so user friendly to be able to have everything in just one spot.
My office will soon start using this as a part of our internal selections (also known as limited competitions) process. Right now, our program manager who is in charge of internal selections uses a very complex system that's combined with SharePoint and her own Excel documents and emails and our website and everything that she... There are so many steps to her procedure!
She will be able to get so much time back and do other parts of her job because she'll be able to have a unified template that she can pretty much just copy and paste without having to go through all of the very many steps that she has to do presently for internal selections. She was showing me the whole process as her backup, and I was like, 'your life is going to change with InfoReady'.
