Forms take a vacation

Monday, July 21, 2008 8:13 AM

Don Campbell is President of Expand2Web, and dedicates his career to helping small business owners with local store-fronts connect with customers over the web. Here, he proves his tech-savvy creativity by showing us a very fun, and seasonally-appropriate use of forms.

I spend most of my time every day working with small business owners helping them with their local search strategy to get more customers from the web. But sometimes the best solutions emerge from how you use the web at home...

A good friend of mine organizes a family beach camping trip every year on the coast, just South of Santa Cruz. The campground is situated on the bluffs overlooking the beach and the Pacific ocean.

Its a great setup since most of us have young kids, and as you know if you’ve got kids they *love* to play on the beach and in the surf. We’ve figured out how to get a group of campsites that are perfectly placed in the redwoods and eucalyptus trees along the bluff every year. We spend the days down on the beach with the kids and the evenings at the campsite. It’s one of those truly magical trips that we all look forward to every year.

But this year we had a problem - the trip has been getting very popular as our core set of families started telling friends about it, and we were up to 100 people from 24 families who wanted to go on the trip!

We were able to book enough campsites for this many people, but our key challenge was how to manage the meals. Imagine having to cook dinner for 100 people!

We had everyone's email addresses, and were brainstorming on how to coordinate the meals so that everyone could contribute, and there would be enough food for every meal. I had used the new Forms feature in Google Spreadsheets for a few of my customers in the past, and got an idea that it might be able to help us here too.

So here’s what we did:
1) I set up a Google Spreadsheet with the information we wanted to collect from each of the families. We collected information like:

• Family name
• How many adults
• How many children
• Which meals will you be eating
• Choose a preferred meal to prepare (e.g. Saturday breakfast)
• Menu plan
• Special requirements
• Phone #

2) We turned this into a Form, and sent it out to our list of families. As I mentioned, we already had their email addresses, so we were able to include the form directly in their email! They could also click a link to view the entire spreadsheet - we wanted everyone to be able to see what everyone else was doing, although Google Spreadsheets does allow you to restrict this.

3) Amazingly, we had almost all of our responses within 3 days! I was expecting some phone calls and emails from people who were a little confused or didn’t understand how the form worked, or how to view the spreadsheet. But I had zero questions. And I know that many of the families are not exactly comfortable in front of the computer if you know what I mean. What I DID get were comments from four of the families saying “Hey, I didn’t know you could do that with Google! Can you show me how to do this? So I sent them to Google Docs and shared this video - Quick and Easy Forms - with them and that was all they needed to get going.

A few of the things that made this a very workable solution:

1. We were able to create and share the form within minutes.
2. Spreadsheet updates in real time allowed my friend and I - in different locations - to see the same data as it came in, in case we needed to adjust anything or track how things were going.
3. The ability to include the form in an email made it super easy for people to fill it out right away.
4. The ability to let everyone view the spreadsheet over the web in their browser allowed them to see what other families were doing, or get their phone number in case they needed to discuss how they were going to team up on a meal, for example.

Our trip is later this month, and now we’ve got the meal plans all figured out two weeks in advance. With that out of the way I’m looking forward to a great camping trip and meeting some fun new families. Oh yeah, and eating some really good meals too!


Posted by: Don Campbell, President of Expand2Web and happy camper