It’s at this time of year that churches start to encourage their members to get into a Bible study/Connect/Community group. Organising groups can be a messy and time-intensive process as you distribute forms, people complete the forms, hand the forms back in and then the hard job starts – assigning people to groups with the people they want to be with, and in some cases ensuring some people aren’t in the same group!
There is an easier way.
About four years ago I discovered a web application by the name of Wufoo. Put simply, it’s a very straightforward (and non-technical) way of creating all kinds of forms, collecting information and then viewing the results. You can take a tour of the features of Wufoo here. Today I want to show you in five steps how you can use Wufoo to streamline the sign-up process for the Bible study groups at your church.
1. Sign-up for an account with Wufoo. You can create up to 3 forms for free.
2. Click on the link to ‘new form’.
3. Use the buttons on the left to add fields you would like to include in your form. For example, if you would like to have a space for someone to fill in their name, drag the ‘name’ button across into your form.
4. Once you have finished adding the fields you require, you can then save the form and distribute it. Wufoo provides a link so you can send the form to people via email, or you can place some code on your church website for people to fill in the form there.
5. When it comes time to collate the responses and assign people to groups, you can then export all of the responses into an Excel spreadsheet, making it super-easy to start the process of assigning people to groups. If you like, you can also set it up to receive an email each time someone completes the form.
Here’s one I prepared earlier…
To show you what the finished product looks like, I’ve created a sample form, based on the form I’ve created for my church. It took me 15 minutes to pull this together – click here to view the sample form.
Do you think this process would work at your church? Why or why not? How does your church coordinate the process of getting people into Bible study groups? Got a suggestion for how this process could be made easier?
Feature image credit: hvaldez1
Steve,
Great site-keep the ideas coming! The link does not work.
How would you compare this to google forms (created in docs) where the back end of the form is a exel type spreadsheet?
thanks
Hi Roger,
thanks for the feedback. Thanks also for letting me know about the broken link – it should be fixed now, so feel free to check it out now.
As for Google Forms, I think it has some great functionality and would certainly do the job for many types of forms.
I like some of the extra features that Wufoo provides – for example, Wufoo can provide statistics and graph the responses (not needed for Bible study sign-up, but useful for other types of forms). You can create specific themes and colour schemes. Payment can also be integrated into your forms (which again isn’t necessary for Bible study sign-up), but I’ll be exploring the potential for this to be used for events like church camps.
Steve
We have placed a link to your site on:
http://www.you-need-jesus-com/10.html.
Surely as you look at our site you will find our goals to be similar and that link sharing will be a good thing.
If you like what you see, please place our site in your links.
Thank you,
Frank Beck
beckfab@msn.com