Your church needs to figure out how well they’re doing with their Big Event. They need a survey for attendees to fill out and they need it as soon as possible. What do you do? If you have a Google Apps account or even just a regular Google account, you can create a Form in Google to store and later analyze responses. Of course, it’s never that easy, right? Let’s look at what’s involved.
- Decide the Purpose For and Design a Draft of Your Form – This is often overlooked. If you don’t have a good purpose or design for your form, you’re going to get poor results. Having worked in a position responsible for creating meaningful surveys and extracting useful information from those results, I can’t stress this point enough. Design your form. What do you want it to do? What information do you need? What information will you extract? A registration form should collect Names, Email, Phone, perhaps Ages, Allergies, Contact Information, and other information relating to the event. A questionnaire may not need a name, but should include some rankings on items that you want to analyze. Perhaps you want to know if people enjoyed themselves or felt safe, how long did they stay, what did they enjoy the most. Where possible, use a predetermined set of criteria – numbers for rankings or a defined set of choices. It will make getting the information back much easier. Once you’ve done the first pass on paper, run it by other people. Often they’ll suggest things that you may not have considered. Edit your form requirements until you’re satisfied.
- Create and Edit a Form – Log in to your Google Docs account or perhaps your Church’s Google Apps account. (You do have a Google Apps account, right?) Most people want to start with creating. While it may be helpful to see your form taking shape, this should still be considered as part of step 1.
- Create a New Form from their menu. Add a meaningful title and a description if appropriate.
- Add your questions or response items. Don’t forget to make them required or not required according to your design.
- Add Section Headers or Page Breaks to group items or to allow people to skip to certain pages of your form.
- Change the Theme of the form if you want a different look using the “Theme” button. Some themes may work better than others on your site.
- Preview the form with the link at the bottom of the page as you go. Make sure that your form seems to have the correct flow and behavior.
- Don’t forget about your response. If you want to give people a link to another web site or perhaps a different Thank You message, edit that response in the “More Actions” dropdown.
- Have others review the draft form – Have other people you trust look over your form. Have them fill it out. Look at the results. Adjust ordering or required fields. Add values if some are missing. Check spelling. Give them the link to the published form so they can try it out themselves. If they can use different browsers, that can only help.
- Edit Your Form – Now that you’ve got feedback, edit the form as needed with the recommendations. Repeat steps 2-4 until you have no more changes to make.
- Email On Submission – If you want to be notified on new form submissions, you’ll need to view the Spreadsheet behind the form. On the Form Design page, choose to “See responses” and choose the “Spreadsheet” option. This will take you to the underlying spreadsheet. Choose the “Tools” menu, then choose the “Notification Rules” item. This will enable you to receive e-mails for any of the events that happen. Sadly, this does not allow you to select a group of people at this time. For that, you’ll need to set up a rule of some sort to forward those messages to others. However, it can be useful to know if you’re getting form submissions or if people are changing other parts of the spreadsheet. This is an optional step, but if you want to be notified when people use your form, this is an easy way to receive notifications.
- Share the Spreadsheet Containing the Responses – Of course, you’re rarely the only one who wants to see what’s going on. To share the spreadsheet, look on the upper right corner of the spreadsheet for the “Share” button. Click that and add people as viewers, editors, or whatever role is needed for those people. Giving people access to the data behind the form will let them see what’s going on and allow them to analyze the submissions as well.
- Publish the Form – More than likely you won’t e-mail a link to your form to everyone you want to use it. You’ll want to put it on your website somewhere. To get the code to put on your website, click the “More Actions” button and choose “Embed”. You’ll be given a somewhat long string of HTML. Put that in the HTML of the desired page on your website and you’ll have the form ready to go. If the form is not the desired size, you can easily adjust the “width” and “height” values in the code you’re given. You can’t adjust the size or position of any of the elements within that link through native code. (You may be able to do it with some undocumented tricks but I wouldn’t rely on them long-term as they could stop working if Google changes something.) Publishing may not be allowed in all scenarios, such as putting this directly into a Rich Text Editor, but a lot of CMS’ have some way to insert pure HTML. If you’re not sure how to accomplish inserting the HTML, ask your web people for some help.
- Analyze the Results – Finally, you want to see the results. I’ve found that Google’s forms do really well in this area. In your Docs you have the spreadsheet that drives the form. Open the spreadsheet. You’ll probably see a bunch of data by default. However, since this was generated by a form, you can also choose the “Form” menu to “Show a Summary of Responses”. This is a great way to see trends, averages, highs, lows, combinations of selections, and other useful information. If this was just used for recording registrations, you may not need this and can work with the data. However, if you collected feedback for events, Google’s forms solution shows you a lot of data about your forms without having to do much. Incidentally, this menu also allows you to close the form to new responses, edit the form, or delete the form if it’s no longer in use. You can always download this to your local spreadsheet if you want to do further analysis or more detailed analysis beyond what Google provides.
Well, maybe it was that easy after all. With a little time to become familiar with the process, you can create a form and publish it in minutes rather than days. No learning new programming languages. No fees. No limitations on the number of items on your form. Just add your items, save it, and embed the form on your site.
I’ve used Google’s Forms to register people for an event quickly and easily, collected feedback for some of our programs, and been able to use that feedback to drive decisions by seeing what people liked or didn’t like. My church didn’t need a lot of programming experience. All of the people who needed to see the results could see them when they needed them without asking someone to run a report. Was it a perfect solution? No. I couldn’t adjust the form internals very much when it came to look and feel. I’d love a better layout when some of the options don’t need to flow up and down or for things like collecting Name, Address, and Contact information in a more pleasing manner. I’d have appreciated a little more number crunching ability online. However, I think those areas are not as important for our purposes. The speed and ease to create a form, publish it, and collect/analyze the results are hard to beat when you need something that works, but may not have all of the bells and whistles found in some other products or services.
What do you use to gather information?
How could you use something like this for your church?