Today we are going to look at how to use Microsoft Forms in you church, but first, a bit of a rant…
There’s something that churches do all the time that makes me cringe… okay, there’s lots of things that churches do all the time that make me cringe, 🤣 but right now I’m talking about asking people to sign up for things via email addresses or paper forms and how you should always be pointing people to a digital form instead.
Why does it bother me so much? A few reasons:
- It breeds inconsistency which leads to confusion
- You are guaranteed to waste time on manual data entry
- It’s easy for things to slip through the cracks
- You end up with data outside your control (especially if you ask people to send email to a volunteer’s private email address)
- And you can’t easily leverage automation.
So what’s the best way of letting people sign up for things these days? Online forms!
Okay, so maybe forms aren’t quite that exciting, but they can really streamline your church operations. 😉
Why use online forms at all?
First, it’s important to aggregate the information about your congregation. I like knowing who’s engaging by signing up for things and using that as one of the criteria for putting people into high, medium, and low engagement buckets so I can put the right next steps in front of them for their continued progress in discipleship. I’m not going to get that if it stays on paper or resides inside somebody’s personal email inbox. Likewise, data silos is a very real problem in most churches that needs broken down and the best way to do that is to centralize as much collection as possible. 😔
Second, when you always present the same method of signing up for things at your church, then you actually train your people to sign up for things. This is especially true if you make it easy to find your forms via your church website. Think about it, if you know that you can always go to https://mycrazychurch.com/events then even if you are only half-paying attention to announcements, you know where to go. That being said, you can always directly link the form in an email designed to ask the congregant to sign up.
Finally, they make process automation and integration with Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms trivial. If somebody signs up for an event, you can get an alert in Teams, have them added to a spreadsheet, your Church Management System (ChMS), and email list. If you don’t automate it, then you need to have staff try to update multiple systems and they’ll invariably have things fall through the cracks due to a distraction.
Why Microsoft Forms?
So, first things first, Microsoft Forms may not be the right choice for your registration flow. You might want to do it all through a form interface in your ChMS, a SaaS app like Eventbrite, your marketing platform (like Hubspot or Mailchimp), or even a plugin for your website’s Content Management System (CMS). Similarly, for appointments you would want to use Microsoft Bookings to allow people to book a time to meet with you.
Now, if you are moving toward no-code/low-code apps for your church (and you absolutely should be), then Microsoft Forms is a great tool. For example, let’s say you want to let volunteers enter the weekly attendance count, easy-peasy, you just need a Form and Power Automate! You can even put that information into Dataverse, feed dashboards in Power BI, and feed that info into AI tools.
It can basically streamline the church office and free up staff to focus on more valuable tasks. 😎
What should I include in a form?
The biggest rule here is that you should never include more in a form than is absolutely necessary to the immediate task at hand. This usually means you need name and email. Sometimes, you only need email, but I would try to at least get a first/given name so that you can personalize your bulk emails.
One thing you should definitely put onto forms is an acknowledgement of your privacy policy. This is pretty much mandatory in some regions that have personal data protection laws, but it’s a good practice even if your region doesn’t require it.
Closing thoughts
You don’t have to use Microsoft Forms per se, and there are situation in which you shouldn’t use it, but if you have to choose between having people make a phone call, send an email, register in-person, or use Microsoft Forms, then you should use Microsoft Forms pretty much every time. Even if Microsoft Forms is not the right tool for a particular sign-up, try to drive consistency and better management of the church through online forms.
