Ben Burnham, the assistant director of facilities and aquatics at Colorado State University, shares about discovering and partnering with Connect2Concepts:
CR: How did you discover Connect2Concepts?
BB: We became aware of Connect2Concepts at the 2015 NIRSA Annual Conference and then had many follow up discussions with Jenn Jacobs from Connect2Concepts. Jenn made the onboarding process very easy to understand and our department was very excited to partner with Connect2Concepts early on in the software’s development.
CR: Why did you partner with them?
BB: Colorado State University, one of the nation’s most sustainable universities, is the first university in the world to have its sustainability efforts go Platinum, twice. Campus Recreation wanted to do our part to make our facility operations paperless. The mission of the Colorado State University Department of Campus Recreation is to be a benchmark recreational program, and Connect2Concepts allowed us to live out our mission. In addition to the sustainable features, the Connect2Concepts team has a background working in recreation, and they created Connect2Concepts to solve the problems they faced when they were in facility management positions. Their company’s previous experience in the recreation industry was very reassuring, and it resulted in a product that filled a void in the marketplace. The application allows us to streamline operations, improve communication and training, and make our data collection and management more efficient. Once we did the research and reference checks, signing on with Connect2Concepts was an easy decision.
CR: What do you like about partnering with Connect2Concepts?
BB: Working with Jenn and the Connect2Concepts team is a model for company-to-client relations. The Connect2Concepts team listens to the feedback provided to them, and the application has undergone numerous upgrades based on user feedback. I have worked with many companies in the past where suggestions seem to be put in a queue and never revisited, whereas Connect2 is continually soliciting feedback to improve the functionality and user experience. It has been a very rewarding journey from being one of the first departments to use the application to now seeing all of the new features and modules that exist.
CR: How does this partnership benefit your rec center?
BB: Our department now utilizes Connect2Concepts in nearly every programmatic and staffing area within our facility. We have consciously made the effort to move away from paper for a variety of reasons, and it has streamlined our processes in a very positive way. The application allows for our department to be more efficient in its day-to-day operations, and it has also impacted global functions like how we report information in our departmental annual report.
CR: Was there anything that pleasantly surprised you about working with Connect2Concepts?
BB: There are two areas that have pleasantly surprised me when working with Connect2Concepts. The first is the level of customer support offered by Connect2Concepts. They respond to questions and concerns within a few days of the reported problem, and they provide numerous manuals and video trainings to assist with the implementation process. The second item is how quickly our student employees bought into using the platform. The current generation of students are inherently digital, so the transition from paper to the iPad was welcomed and now the staff cannot imagine going back to a paper-based system.
For more information, visit connect2concepts.com.
