Earlier this week I wrote about Wufoo on Communicate Jesus, and on Sydney Anglicans. I explained that churches get a 50% discount.

One of the questions posted on Sydney Anglicans was this:

“Any reason why go Wufoo over the (free) Google forms?”

Earlier this year I decided to abandon Wufoo for Google Forms (a part of Google Docs). I did this because I thought I’d save some money. I persevered and created 14 forms, but the functionality that I lost wasn’t worth the cost saving. I returned to Wufoo.

To be sure, Wufoo (even with a 50% discount) is more expensive than the free Google Docs. Sometimes a free product is on par with a paid product. Rarely is a free product better than a paid product. Wufoo wipes the floor with Google Docs, and even though it costs money, is the better solution for churches and ministries.

Here are 10 reasons why Wufoo is better than Google Docs (in no particular order).

1. The service is excellent. Whenever I’ve had a question, I’ve received an answer in less than 24 hours. With Google Forms, if you’ve got a question, you’ll need to trawl the internet and post on forums to (hopefully) get an answer. You don’t realise how important good service is until you need help.

2. Payment integration. Wufoo forms allow you to collect payments in the forms. This means if you’d like to collect payments (e.g. church camp, celebration dinner, etc) you can accept these on the same form that people use to sign-up to the event.

3. Great reporting tools. Google Forms will export to an Excel spreadsheet. Wufoo does that, and also provides tools to very easily create stunning reports. Wufoo will turn the data from your forms into graphs, charts, datagrids and more, so the information you’ve collected can be represented graphically, with very little effort on your behalf. You can see examples here.

4. Conditional logic and branching. Wufoo’s rule builder allows you to create conditions – e.g. if a user selects answer X to question A, then question B is hidden, and they jump straight to question C. You can see a good explanatory video here.

5. Notifications. For example, I set-up a form for registrations for the church’s upcoming parenting course. When someone signs up for the course, an email with all the details is sent to the course organiser. Google Forms only allows notifications to be sent to the creator of the form.

6. Custom themes. You can add a logo, change a colour scheme, or if you (or someone in your church) knows what they’re doing, add CSS (to make the form look like your church’s website).

7. Field options. Google offers these options for creating fields in your form:

Wufoo offers these options:

Wufoo also provides a theme gallery, with a range of forms that you can customise for your own use (e.g. mailing lists, contact forms, church visitors forms, and many more).

8. Multiple users. Wufoo allows you to set-up multiple users, so that one person doesn’t need to be responsible for creating each of the forms. This means (for example), the person overseeing women’s ministry could have their own log-in and access their own forms, without seeing or being able to edit any other forms.

9. Easy to share. Wufoo provides simple links to share your forms and surveys with others – in 6 different ways:

10. Regular additions of new features. The team at Wufoo listens to feedback from their users, and improves their product based on this feedback. The blog provides updates, and whenever new features are added, a notification appears when you log-in to Wufoo. They’re not sitting back basking in their success – the improvements are constant!

Not convinced? Try it for free, and get 3 forms to play with.

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• Wufoo (for forms)
• TimeBridge (for meetings), and
• DropBox (for managing and accessing my files anywhere).

Below is a list of 18 directories to find web apps in every category under the sun!

1. AppSheriff
2. alternativesTo (also with Windows and Mac software)
3. feedmyapp
4. Go2web20
5. Great Web Apps
6. KillerStartups
7. Launchly
8. Listio
9. LovelyPages (“discover new web apps to love”)
10. Make Use Of
    
11. The Museum of Modern Betas
12. Protolize (though it doesn’t seem to have been updated in a while)
13. usefultools
14. Wakoopa
15. WebAppers
16. Web.Appstorm
17. Webware 100
18. Ziipa

Update:

1. AppVita
2. Great Web Apps

I also recommend ‘101 Essential Freelancing Resources‘ – even if you’re not a freelancer, there’s much inspiration to be had. Also, The Guardian’s collection of ‘100 essential websites‘, and Guy Kawasaki’s ‘12 tools to help you rule‘.

What web apps do you find useful for ministry? Can you recommend any other directories worth exploring?

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• You visit the Chatroulette website.
• You click ‘start a new game
• You are randomly assigned one person to chat with. At the time I was checking out Chatroulette there were 20,000 people online.
• You chat via video and text for as long as you want, and then when you’re done talking, you click ‘Next’ and move onto the next person. Of course, the person you’re chatting with can do the same too!

Obviously this website (and others like it, e.g. onlychat.com) have their dangers:

• your self-confidence could be rocked if people constantly ‘nexted’ you,
• they’re dominated by men (i.e. there’s a tendancy to be dating-focused),
• it’s open to abuse by perverts (what isn’t these days?!)

A film maker has put together a video of his experiences with Chatroulette:

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

Those dangers aside (if indeed we can push them aside), I had an idea. Could we use Chatroulette for evangelism? We knock on peoples doors to tell them about Jesus – this is a very similar concept!

What do you think?

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Thanks to Check 1-2, I discovered CreateBooklet. It adds an option to ‘Create booklet’ when you print a file on your Mac. It’s a little tricky to explain, so I’ll leave that to the guys at Check 1-2. Thankfully, the developer has also released an update for Snow Leopard. And, it’s free. I’ve got a lot of respect and thanks for people who develop free, quality apps. Thanks Christoph.

If you’re not using a Mac, an online application that does the same thing is Booklet Creator. Here are some instructions about how to use BookletCreator, including explaining how A4 PDFs are turned into A5 booklets.

My guess is, most people are still using Microsoft Office. However, if you’re not using Word, or you have a PDF that you want to turn into a booklet, you might find these tools to be quite useful.

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1. Help Haiti: Donate to the Red Cross Through iTunes -http://bit.ly/4ZW8zQ
2. Reading: ’20 of the Best Church Website Designs’ -http://bit.ly/7hKd3f
3. Red Cross Raises $1,000,000+ for Haiti Through Text Message Campaign - http://bit.ly/6hzxN9
4. Google is fed up with China - http://bit.ly/5Q34Gr
5. I’ll find this very useful for my work at church – Google now providing online storage for more file formats -http://bit.ly/72YmlL
6. Normally I use #CoTweet for tweeting and been very happy with it - http://bit.ly/5Sjqoy. What do you use for your Twittering?
7. The comments continue to come in on the post ‘Should Christian creatives work for free’. http://bit.ly/4SFBlK
8. Great post by @stevefogg – ‘Losing Your Message but Gaining Publicity’. http://bit.ly/5aqsq0
9. Church…Virtually - http://bit.ly/5mKGsv (via @challies)
10. If you use Gmail, check out these useful keyboard shortcuts -http://bit.ly/8qlO4A
11. Unicef’s ‘Turn soliders back into children’ campaign -http://bit.ly/5PkWv1
12. Churches often struggle to liaise with creatives. How can we help churches work better with them? Add your thoughts -http://bit.ly/7x6qja
13. My latest post at Sydney Anglicans. ‘Churches need to catch up’. The tools are there, but do we have the will?http://bit.ly/7x6qja
14. The phone for priests?! I’ve never seen a priest feature in a telecommunications ad before! http://bit.ly/7gnzjj
15. John Piper shares how he uses Twitter - http://bit.ly/6xDN4Z
16. Reading: ‘Ten questions to ask at the start of the new year’.http://bit.ly/89NR8h
17. If you use Gmail and the Mac Address Book, here’s a good tip for keeping your contacts in sync - http://bit.ly/7p5ueu
18. Reading: ’4 Reasons To Employ Social Media In 2010′http://bit.ly/8Fc3DB (via @PennOlson)
19. Reading: ‘The Best Free Software of 2009′ -http://bit.ly/7BA694
20. Reading: ‘How Twitter Conquered the World in 2009′ -http://bit.ly/6IC0se

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And Google Sets came up with the following additional items:

Sure, some of the suggestions weren’t quite what I was looking for, but it was a helpful first step for the brainstorming process. Go on, give it a try!

Can you think of any other ministry applications for Google Sets?

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Visit BibleMap and enter the passage you would like to learn about (e.g. Amos 1). An interface similar to Google Maps appears, plotting each of the locations mentioned in the passage:

A colour code explains what each of the coloured markers mean – e.g. cities, locations inside cities, regions, etc.

Clicking on the coloured marker that plots each location will display details of that place, and other mentions of that location in the Bible.

You also benefit from some of the other Google Map features, such as viewing the map as a map, or as a satellite image, or as a combination of both. It’s a simple tool, serving a simple but useful purpose. It served me well in my sermon preparation, and may prove useful for you too.

Are you aware of similar tools for getting a better understanding of Old Testament contexts?

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• Surveys, polls and sign-up forms (e.g. Wufoo)
• Organising meetings (e.g. TimeBridge)
• Reputation management (e.g. Google Alerts)
• Website analytics (e.g. Google Analytics)
• Collaboration (e.g. Huddle)
• Password management (e.g. Pastor)
• Email newsletters (e.g. Campaign Monitor)
• Task management (e.g. Remember the Milk)
• Note taking (e.g. Evernote)
• Time tracking (e.g. Freckle)
• Asset management (e.g. Dropbox)

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It’s just as well Google launched this – I’d forgotten how many Google services I use – 14 in total! Some I use regularly, like Gmail and Google Alerts. Others I haven’t used in years, like my Blogger account, but I haven’t got around to deleting. Now might be the time.

The Sydney Morning Herald and Mashable have also reported on this new service.

It makes me wonder – how many accounts do you and I have out there on the world wide web, for products and services that we haven’t used in a very long time? When you have some time spare, it could be worth your while trawling your email for all those confirmation emails that you receive when you sign-up for a new service, and if you no longer use the service, delete your account. There’s no point keeping an account active that you no longer use.

I’ve done this in bursts at various times – and discovered how difficult it can be to delete some accounts. For example, Mecanbe.com never answers my emails, and Plaxo continued to send emails after I’d deleted my account!

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Last week, technology blogs Mashable and Cnet that the Los Angeles’ city council is about to start using Google Apps. For those unfamiliar, Google Apps is a set of tools provided by Google to assist organisations with communication, collaboration and publishing.

How does it work?

Most churches and ministry organisations will already have their own domain (e.g. www.stanglican.com). You can keep this domain and use Google to manage these common tasks:

• Email – use Google’s email tool (Gmail) to manage your email. Your email address will remain the same (e.g. steve@stanglican.com), but there are added benefits such as awesome spam filtering, access to email wherever you have internet access, and a dedicated team working behind the scenes, 24/7/365 to make sure your email is always available. Here’s some more tips and benefits to using Gmail.
• Calendars – use Google’s calendar tool (Google Calendar) to manage your schedule and collaborate with the schedules of others in your team/ministry/church. There are many benefits to not using a paper diary, but one of the most compelling for ministry is collaboration. Google Calendar will allow you to create multiple calendars, see who has what on when, allocate resources, find common meeting times, and publish (where appropriate, of course) particular calendars online for anyone to access. That’s a very brief sell – check out a tour with more of the features.
• Documents – use Google’s document creation/management tool (Google Docs) to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations. You can import (eg. from Word/Excel/PowerPoint) and export to the same formats (and others) – i.e. you can maintain most of the benefits to using Microsoft Office and open documents others send you. Again, one of the key features is collaboration – Google Docs is a great platform for sharing documents and allowing others to work with you on particular documents, without the issues associated with emailing these around and hoping you’re working on the most current version. And importantly, you don’t need to be connected to the internet to access your documents.

There are other tools and benefits provided by the Google Apps service – all available free for non-profits (i.e. churches and most ministry organisations!) Learn more of the features of Google Apps, or sign-up.

Will your church or ministry organisation join LA city council?

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