Using Wufoo for Church Event Registration
Posted by Mike Robinson on May 05, 2010 in Web Apps, Websites tagged with form, registration, Web Apps, Websites, WufooSo as I’m working through this whole update of my church’s website using E-zekiel, the director for one of our young adult programs asks me about setting up an online registration form for their next event. Online registration forms isn’t something that E-zekiel has a manager for, so I started looking around for a solid option I could try out. I was talking to a friend of mine and he suggested Wufoo.
This may be old news for some, but I’ll walk through what I did on our website for any who may appreciate the step-by-step example. Wufoo is (basically) an online HTML form builder. Their pricing ranges from free (which is the route I took) to some pretty heavy support that’s up to $199.95 per month. The free option allows one user to create three forms with up to 10 fields and 100 entries per month, which is more than enough for our program’s needs.
So the first thing that I did was create a new Web page with all of the basic promotional event information on it (event summary, agenda, pricing, package details, etc.). Then I added text at the top and bottom of the page (just so it appears at the end once they’ve read all the information and also at the top so it’s not buried) that says, “Register Online Now!” to link to the form I’ll be creating through Wufoo. (I also directed them to the appropriate church bulletin board if they’d rather sign up that way instead of online.)
Once I had the basic event page set up (but not live yet), I went to http://wufoo.com. I went to their pricing page and chose the Sign Up! option under the “Free” heading. Registration was pretty easy and I didn’t run into any snags there. In the top right corner of the Form Manager there’s a button called “New Form!”. Once you get into that, you have three main tabs to actually build your form: Add a Field, Field Settings, and Form Settings. Everything’s pretty intuitive at this point.
With the Add a Field tab, I added fields for Name, Single Line Text (to identify roommates), Multiple Choice (to identify the trip package they’re choosing), Phone, and E-mail.
If your form is longer or more complicated than mine, you can use the Section Break and Page Break tools to organize your content to make it easier to follow and complete.
With the Field Settings tab, I made several of the fields required (i.e., Name, Package Number, and Phone). I also changed several of the default Field Labels. For example, I made the Phone field label show up as “Your Evening Phone Number” which is the way the program director had this stated on the physical sign-up sheet on his bulletin board at the church. Of course, this could be a home phone number, mobile phone number, etc.; I think his point was just that he would most likely be contacting people about the trip during the evening hours.
With the Form Settings tab, I gave it a Form Name and mostly concentrated on the confirmation options. I entered some basic confirmation text for after the form is submitted that simply says, “Your registration form has successfully been submitted!” I also chose to have a confirmation e-mail sent to the person registering as well, provided they entered an e-mail address. It was just a friendly confirmation message and I snuck in a tactful way of suggesting that they touch base with the program director in-person prior to the trip. Not to say here or to imply to the person registering that they should doubt the reliability of the online registration process, but I figure it never hurts to follow-up for good measure. And we have a small enough (and interactive enough) group going to this event that it shouldn’t be too big a deal for folks to mention in the hall in passing that, “hey, I registered for the trip online” and for the program director to say, “yep, I saw that…you’re all set.” After all, this is our first time doing a trip registration online so we want to make sure everything’s working and if there’s a problem we want to identify that early and get it corrected.
This is something that I didn’t need to get into with my form, but you can also limit the form’s activity by having the form “turn off” after a certain number of entries. This would be especially useful if you can only accept the first 50 registrations for example. Then it won’t be available to anyone after that cutoff and you don’t have to monitor that manually.
Once I was satisfied with all the options and stuff, I made sure the form was saved and returned to the Form Manager. Below the form name on the list there’s a button for Code. First, there are two options for URL links to the form on Wufoo: there’s a URL for use in e-mails and instant messages and there’s also a URL for an HTML link on a Web page. There are also two options for embedding the form so that it appears within the body of a Web page that’s already prepared for it (i.e., within a template that goes along with the rest of your site). There’s also code for a full page form, a pop-up form link, e-mail delivery, and XHTML/CSS code. So you have several options for actually making the form available to people. I chose one of the embed form options for putting the form into the template I’m using for the rest of this program’s pages. So, once you leave that initial sign-up page I was talking about earlier (where you have the link to “Register Online Now!”), you go to the nice, professional-looking form embedded seamlessly into a page that has the same header and navigation options, so it looks 100 percent like it’s built right into the church’s website. In other words, there are no redirects or other clunky clues that the form is actually on another server through some other service than what we’re using for the rest of the church website.
Here’s the final registration page with the form from Wufoo embedded directly into one of the existing templates for the church website.
And that’s pretty much it aside from actually publishing the pages so that they’re live through the church website. I don’t know anything about forms and I was able to set up everything from start to finish in less than an hour, and that included setting up the church Web pages, registering with Wufoo, creating the form, playing around with a bunch of stuff, embedding the code, coordinating with the program director at the church, etc., so it really wasn’t all that involved at all.
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Count me as one more vote in favor of Wufoo. It’s so easy to use, and it’s pretty powerful once you dig into some of the more advanced options. Good stuff.
Wufoo is great. I especially love their UI. I have also used Jotform. They are a great option as well, but not as polished in the design. I might look into them as well.