Our newest spotlight features Neil Palesh, Treasurer of Financial Management Institute - Edmonton Chapter (FMI Edmonton)! FMI Edmonton has been a Cognito Forms customer for over two years, utilizing our platform to build and manage registration forms for a variety of events throughout the year.
1. Tell us a little bit about your business!
Neil: FMI Edmonton is a non-profit organization that brings together financial professionals across three levels of government in the Edmonton, Alberta area for morning learning events. Our programming is diverse, covering financial and relevant current event topics. We typically bring together 110 attendees for our events, which happen four times a year. Our organization is run and events planned by a volunteer board of finance professionals.
2. Why did you choose Cognito Forms?
Neil: Before Cognito, our organization was using a manual driven, semi-online registration system by a remote service provider. Feedback from registrants on this system was confusing and slow, taking sometimes several days to confirm a registration. The system did not facilitate our reporting requirements: effective registration of volunteers and registration of multiple people at the same time. It collected too much information from registrants, and it was also quite expensive.
3. How does your business use Cognito Forms?
Neil: I started using Cognito for another volunteer organization I’m part of, and saw an opportunity to better meet our business needs with Cognito here too. We have implemented several of the robust features offered on the platform:
- Using tables, we’re able to accommodate multiple registrants on the same form and track registrant attendance and cancellations;
- Using conditional logic we’re able to pre-populate certain fields based on the registrant’s email domain, pre-populate a portion of the table in a custom way for specific email address, and generate discounts based on user’s input on the name field.
- Using custom errors, we’re able to enforce data hygiene in the registrations in the name and email fields;
- using Stripe, we’re able to collect payment at the time of registration entirely in the background without the need to create a user account in a totally PCI-compliant fashion;
- Using the notification email, we’re able to also attach a PDF invoice of the registration;
- Using the entries tab and Excel exports, we’re able to monitor registration in real time;
- Using the Cognito hosted form, we’re able to quickly facilitate a registration just through a link which we can share in our emails and on our website; and
- Using the limit availability feature, we’re able to enforce registration deadlines.
Cognito has been transformative for our registration process and our registrants are extremely pleased with the simplicity and speed of registering for our events. As a volunteer board, Cognito takes a lot of the registration hassle and administrative work out and allows us to focus on our programming. Due to the seasonal nature of our programming, we appreciate a flexible monthly pricing model which ensures that we only pay for the months that we use the service. Cognito staff have also been amazing to deal with when we’ve run into challenges in form design or functionality.
Thank you so much to Neil for taking the time to answer our questions! Would you like to be featured in our next spotlight? Feel free to get in touch with us!
Nadia A.
Nadia, the Technical Writer for Cognito Forms, develops documentation, support content, and how-to videos. No matter your experience – with her help, you'll be able to take full advantage of the product. In her spare time, Nadia enjoys listening to French house, drinking coffee, and talking about herself in third person.