Rose Ochoa is the Officer Manager of Mineral King Publishing, Inc in Exeter, California. Her responsibilities include doing all the legals and record-keeping for more than one paper. “I can handle it,” she says humbly, but there’s no doubt she’s very busy. She’s happy that at least one of her papers – the Sun-Gazette in Exeter, California – uses Column to help process public notices.
One of Ochoa’s favorite parts about Column are the notice templates. She uses them especially to place Fictitious Business Name (FBN) notices for her customers. The templates help ensure that each FBN adheres to its strict, legally-enforced format and reduce the time it takes Ochoa to type out the notice text. Notice templates are useful for court-mandated notices like FBNs, which tend to include standard inflexible language and require a high level of legal compliance.
When a publisher or customer chooses to use one of Column’s notice templates to place their notice, they just fill in just their unique information — i.e. the specific customer or court information that varies from notice to notice — and the template auto-generates a pre-drafted notice for them.
The Before: Our Old Typeform Templates
Ochoa used to use our old notice templates to place Fictitious Business Name notices on behalf of her customers. We designed these original templates as a questionnaire asking customers and publishers to fill in their information step-by-step. At the end, the completed questionnaire would generate the notice.
“It used to be a longer process,” said Ochoa, reflecting on Column’s old templates. “It was also hard to edit the notices because you’d have to go back through the form step-by-step.”
Ochoa added that the old questionnaire template could be “a little intimidating.” She explained that “you had to click the start button and go through the content line by line.” The template also opened up in a new window of the browser, bringing the user outside of the Column app, which could be confusing.
Introducing: New and Improved Notice Templates
Earlier this year, our team approached The Sun-Gazette about testing out our improved notice templates. Since Ochoa’s one of our top Column users, she and The Sun-Gazette were the perfect partners for using our new notice templates. “I use Column almost every day,” Ochoa said. And she places a lot of FBNs, a notice type that’s perfect for taking advantage of this feature.
The key difference between our old templates and our improved ones is the new fill-in-the-blank format. We also embedded this fill-in-the-blank template directly into the text box of the placement process so publishers and customers can simply type their custom information into the blue blanks and watch their whole notice preview generate in front of them.
Ochoa highlighted the top three ways the new notice templates have improved her work day:
- Faster Input. “The fill-in-the-blank templates are a lot easier to use for putting in the notice information. It’s faster than the old form because you can see the whole notice all at once.”
- Fewer Errors. “I find that I don’t have to go back and make so many edits to the notice content. I used to have to make corrections to almost every FBN that a customer submitted. Now I don’t.”
- Improved Customer Experience. “I can already tell that these new notice templates have improved our customers’ experience because I’m editing our customer’s FBN notices far less. Our customers haven’t had any issue using the new feature at all.”
Impact: New and Improved Notice Templates
To measure the impact of the new notice templates for The Sun-Gazette, we compared one-month periods of time from before and after the introduction of the improved feature for the newspaper.
The two main impacts of the new notice templates were a decrease in edit frequency and a reduction in the time spent placing the notice.
- Less editing. 22% of FBN notices received edits before publication before our new notice template. Now, only 16% receive edits!
- Less time. Before we introduced our new notice templates, Ochoa and her customers took a median time of four and a half minutes to place an FBN notice with Column. Now, the median time to place an FBN has been reduced to three and a half minutes! The new templates cut down the process by a full minute.
“The new notice templates are a lot easier to use,” said Ochoa. “It’s a huge improvement and saves me a lot of time.”
We’re so grateful to the Sun-Gazette for helping us launch this new feature!
If you’re already on the Column platform and want to use our new notice templates, reach out to your Customer Success Manager to get started. If you’re not yet on Column and are interested in getting started, schedule a demo with our team!