How Fair Trade USA easily communicates information to colleagues and partners

Eat, sleep, purchase

Purchasing goods and services has become second nature in our society – so much so that it’s easy to consume aimlessly without thinking about what we’re supporting underneath well-known brands and stylish packaging.

That’s why Fair Trade USA made it their mission to disrupt the way people purchase.

Their belief is simple: Products we buy and sell are connected to the livelihoods of others, so Fair Trade is a way to make a conscious choice for a better world.

Since the early 1980s, Fair Trade USA founder Paul Rice has been working with farmers, fisherman, and workers around the world to sell their goods on Fair Trade terms.

Over the years, Fair Trade’s model of creating ‘shared’ value for all stakeholders has lifted farming communities and the like out of poverty, allowing them to afford basic necessities, such as shelter, running water, and electricity.

Fair Trade’s model is based on sustainable production, trade, and consumption. It abides by meticulous standards, such as fair labor practices and responsible land management to ensure that all stakeholders are being treated fairly.

Once products are evaluated and approved, it gets the Fair Trade Certified seal – proof that the goods were produced and sold in a sustainable way.

Products like coffee, tea, snack foods, seafood, apparel, and home goods are popular in Northern America and widely available. By offering a large selection of goods, Fair Trade has generated an impact of $551 million in additional income for farmers and workers worldwide.

It’s no lie that Fair Trade does a lot. To manage all of their complex business needs, they needed a strong data collection tool that would organize incoming information, increase efficiency, and streamline workflow.

Fair Trade began using Jotform roughly seven years ago and hasn’t looked back. Bennett Wetch, VP of Technology Innovation, discovered Jotform when he was looking for an affordable software tool that would help him be more productive and collect data easily and efficiently.

“Jotform has made it far quicker for us to launch a web form – we’d previously code it manually, which takes time to QA to make sure it’s actually working well.”

Enabling hundreds of coffee farmers from around the world to register for Fair Trade events is one of the biggest ways that Bennett and his team use JotForm.

For example, their Coffee Supply Chain team attends the Specialty Coffee Association’s conference (the biggest coffee conference of the year) and coordinates the travel details of hundreds of coffee bean farmers from around the world so they can join too. The Coffee Supply Chain team builds forms in Jotform, ensures they have proper branding, and then embeds them onto their website with ease.

Fair Trade’s Standards team also uses Jotform for their big agricultural production standard revision, which is exceptionally important since Fair Trade is a certifying body. The Standards team creates forms in English and Spanish and asks multiple, detailed questions about people’s personal information, opinions on standards, and more.

A big part of this review is sifting through the collected data. Prior to using Jotform, the team had to export responses by hand, which was tedious and time-consuming. But now with Jotform’s admin dashboard, it’s easy for the team to review, analyze, export, and share the data as needed.

Using Jotform allows teams at Fair Trade to not only streamline the form building process, but also easily access, manage, and communicate information to colleagues and partners.

“Whenever I can find a tool that does what it promises to do, does it well, and enables us to deliver more quickly, it’s a huge benefit for us.”

Fair Trade empowers society to make responsible, sustainable purchasing decisions. And Jotform powers their information collection.

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