New BFA Online Application Portal

The League of American Bicyclists is excited to announce the launch of our new online Bicycle Friendly America (BFA) Application Portal.

It has been over a decade since the BFA program started accepting applications online, and we’ve learned a lot about how our applicants access and use the program. The new online system was built around valuable feedback we’ve received from applicant communities, businesses, and universities over the years, and the League is pleased to be able to offer a variety of new features and improvements.

Here are just a few highlights of the upgrades you’ll find in the new system:

• Better organized applications. In the online BFA applications, the 5 E’s are now broken out into separate pages, so instead of scrolling through a long list of questions to find your place, you can now easily navigate through the application by clicking on any “E” category name at the top of your application. (See screenshot below.)

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• Easy file uploads. It is now very simple to upload photos, documents, spreadsheets, and even videos in the application with just a few clicks. And, if you attach a photo, bike plan, or policy document in the new application system, you will now see a preview of each attachment right in the application itself (see screenshot below) – and our judges will see them there too!

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• The ability to apply to multiple programs, all from the same account. If a college administration or city government wants to apply for the Bicycle Friendly Business designation as an employer in addition to their existing BFU or BFC status, they can now work on multiple applications in different programs, all from a single account.

• The ability to copy and submit multiple applications within a single program in the same round. If a business is applying for multiple branches, or a university wants to apply for multiple campuses at the same time, they can also now submit those applications all from a single account. Individuals who are submitting multiple similar applications can also now copy their submissions within any single program, making it easier to submit multiple applications for an organization with more than one location. (See screenshot below.)

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• If you don’t meet a deadline, your application will be waiting for you in the next round. There’s no longer any need to copy your answers over from previous rounds after missing a deadline – any information you have entered into an application that wasn’t submitted by the deadline will be automatically transferred to the next round so that you can pick up right where you left off.

To log in and submit an application, both new and renewing applicants should create a new account in the system, which you can do by signing up at http://apply.bikeleague.org.

We’ve also used the new online system as an opportunity to make improvements to the BFA applications themselves. Learn about specific changes to the Bicycle Friendly Community application here!

If you have any feedback or questions about the new BFA Application Portal, please let us know at [email protected].  Our goal is to create a more seamless, simple, user-friendly application process for our communities, businesses, and colleges/universities, and we welcome your feedback to continue improving the program!