Iowa State University Maintains a Safe Campus with Issuetrak

Customer Overview

Iowa State University is a public, land-grant, higher education institution founded in 1858 in Ames, Iowa. The campus has grown to 2,000 acres serving 36,600 students with over 100 bachelor’s, 112 master’s, and 83 PhD level programs as well as 6,700 faculty and staff members.

Challenges

The office of equal opportunity at Iowa State is responsible for tracking any reported violations of Civil Rights or Title IX (sexual harassment or violence) issues. Their largest challenge was being able to document and track the handling of hundreds of cases that potentially have multiple years of input and engagement.

They needed a reliable system that allowed their staff to easily enter complaint data. And with the legal requirements, it had to be a system that offered agile report generation.

Solutions

The team at Iowa State reviewed close to a half a dozen solutions before choosing Issuetrak. According to Margo Foreman, the Director of Equal Opportunity, they chose Issuetrak for four main factors: cost, customization abilities, cross-departmental access, and customer support. “[Issuetrak’s] customer support has been outstanding.”

Issuetrak’s customization allowed them to create user-defined fields to capture complainant and respondent information. They have three overarching categories noting whether the complaint is formal, informal, or technical. They use tasks to capture additional categorization information and to manage their resolution processes.

“Issuetrak provides a depth of functionality at a very reasonable cost which allows our office to be able to afford the high level of case management required.”

-Margo Foreman
Director of Equal Opportunity

Benefits

Foreman says her team has seen multiple benefits since implementing Issuetrak. The increased communication amongst the team, as well as cost savings has been a huge improvement.

In addition, they are hoping to expand their usage in the future. “We are attempting to expand utilization to engage direct response to incident reports related to campus climate,” says Foreman.