Watch how simple it is to build a form with Wufoo
By Kayte Korwitts · August 26th, 2016We loooove videos here at Wufoo and of course, we love how-to videos especially. Who doesn’t love to learn, eh?
So getting back to basics a bit, our resident Martin Scorsese, Kane, has created yet another screencast on the fly for you on our favorite thing ever—form-building. Last time, he went through a quick dive, this time he’s going in even deeper.
Hold your breath, here we go.
Questions, comments? Let us know!
Psst! How to track your forms with SurveyMonkey
By Kane Stanley · August 4th, 2016
If you want to see who has filled out your form, you can simply ask for a few bits of information from your users, such as their name and email address.
Let’s say you already have that information though. It’s not particularly helpful to ask for information you already know, so it would be fantastic if you could track exactly who’s filled out your form without having to ask for it. Fortunately, with the help of our survey creating cousins, SurveyMonkey, there’s a rather cheeky way to get this done.
SurveyMonkey is a beautiful tool that’s perfect to use if you’re creating a customer satisfaction survey, gathering employee engagement data and so on.
If you use SurveyMonkey, you can take advantage of their Email Invitation Collector.
This lets you send your surveys to a specific email list and track exactly who’s responded. We’ll go through how to embed a Wufoo form into SurveyMonkey so you can track who has filled out your forms through their email collector.
To kick things off, we’ll need to create our survey in SurveyMonkey. If you don’t have an account with them, check out their plans and prices. Once you’re signed in, click +Create Survey to get started. They give you options to use a template or copy an existing survey, but we’ll create one from scratch.
Once the survey has been created, you’ll notice it doesn’t look too different from Wufoo. You can create a survey using the different methods on the left side of the page. If you click Builder you can start adding questions to the survey.
We’re not too interested in adding many questions. Our interest lies in wanting to embed our Wufoo form into the survey. To do that, add a Text question. Once you’ve done that, you’ll notice a very mini video camera on the question. Give that a click and then click Embed. It’s here where you’ll put the iFrame embed code from your Wufoo form.
That can be found in the share section within Wufoo. Save when you’ve done that and you’ve created your survey. Easy as pie! Feel free to change the look and feel of the survey through their Themes tab. Otherwise, we’re ready to share.
To set up the email collector, click the Collect Responses tab in the top right corner of the page. Then choose the Email collector. It’s all mega straight forward from here. You can manually add your recipients at the top of your page, or click +Add Recipients to upload your own email list from your email client.
You can also change the subject of your initial email and edit the body of the email as well. Then just click Next and follow along until you can send the email. Once it’s sent, you’re all sorted. Each person will now receive an email asking them to fill out your form.
At any point, you can check your SurveyMonkey account to see who has replied to the survey and who hasn’t. You can even send reminder emails to the people that haven’t replied yet. Pretty nifty stuff.
When you view the survey, the form will be nice and comfy inside of the survey. It’s easy to fill out the form and simply click Done on the survey to complete the process.
We hope this trick is helpful! Questions for Kane? You know where to go.
Top academic templates for educators
By Nicola Plate · August 3rd, 2016
Fall is just around the corner and you know what that means, form fans. Yep—-it’s back to school season! We’re big supporters of all things academics at Wufoo and if we can make your lives as educators a little bit easier? Well, then A pluses for everyone because that’s our goal.
And as just a small token of our huge gratitude to all of you, we’ve compiled a shortlist of top educational templates designed to make your life in the classroom easier.
So get this—there are over 300 templates that you can pick from. And now that our Template Gallery is totally revamped and lovely to look at, that’s the best place to go when you’re just starting out.
We don’t doubt your form-building skills, but we know sometimes you’re in a hurry and need forms fast. With these templates, we’ve covered the first few steps, so you can do just that and get back to teaching.
Gradebook
Grades. It’s one of the few unchanging things about at teacher’s working life. You need to keep track of how everyone’s doing and this can sometimes mean a lot of busywork.
Rather than (gasp!) writing down grades into an actual gradebook or entering them into Excel, why not go with an online form instead? This will save you time and allow for easy filtering and tracking of the data once it’s in the Entry Manager.
Emergency Contact Info
Emergencies sometimes happen. And when they do, you want to be prepared. This template has pre-made fields for names, email, phone, address, and just about everything you’ll need to contact a guardian in the event of an emergency.
Pop Quizzes
Save on some paper by giving all your quizzes online. These are quick, fast, and your students can’t pretend the dog ate their homework.
Now, you might be thinking that these particular templates seem more suited for elementary, middle, and high school…but that’s not all we have available so no worries. For the college and upper level educators out there, here are a few templates to make your classroom life feel less hectic.
Seminar Scheduling
Any college will have some great guest lectures and seminars, but since they’re not part of the standard curriculum, you’ll definitely want to document all of them. This will help keep track of all your visiting profs giving those awesome seminars.
Change of Major
Don’t know about you but changing majors in college happened pretty frequently so it would’ve been nice to have a quick and easy online form to do that in a snap. Well? Try this out and we bet your students will thank you (and the Admissions department too).
College Application
We know the school year may just be beginning for most students, but for those high school seniors planning ahead, college application time will come around sooner than about time for those college applications. Paper applications just aren’t the way to go anymore. They take a long time, they might get lost in the mail, etc. Online applications are super fast, they’re a cinch to evaluate and help keep things organized.
And there you have it, dear educators. Hours of work saved by using templates. Spiff it up with one of our themes and then be sure to clear some space on your desk—you’re about to get a ton of apples from some happy students.
Questions for Nicola? Let her know in the Comments below, we check daily!
Here’s how to connect Wufoo with Google Sheets
By Kayte Korwitts · July 6th, 2016
Of course as you already know, Wufoo stores all your form entries and allows you to export them. But we know you want to send entries to other apps as well.
One common need is to connect Wufoo with Google Sheets to collect all form entries into a single spreadsheet. This serves as a backup for your form entries and also helps you with reporting and analytics.
Automate.io lets you do precisely this. Integrate Wufoo with other popular apps you use, in minutes.
How it Works
- Setup your Google Spreadsheet
Create a spreadsheet where you wish to gather Wufoo form entries. Make sure you have the required Column Names filled in the first row, and some dummy data in the 2nd row as well, as shown here.
2. Add Wufoo to Automate.io
Sign up for Automate, and start by creating a Bot. Add Wufoo as the Trigger application and provide your login credentials. Select the Wufoo form you want to link to Google sheets. This will populate.
3. Link Wufoo and Google Sheets
In the Bot, select Google sheets as your Action app and complete the authentication. Select Add Row as the Action to be performed. You can now select the Spreadsheet to be used and the worksheet within. This will populate the Column names you created.
Now, you can drag-drop the Wufoo form fields into the corresponding columns in the sheet.
Boom - you’re done. Save the Bot and enable it. You should now see new data in the Google Spreadsheet as soon as there’s a form entry.
You can, of course, do much more. Use the Condition option in the Bot to direct sales inquiries into one sheet and support inquiries into a different one. You can also have the Bot create a Trello card and/or send Slack notifications on Wufoo form entry. The possibilities are endless.
Try it out and let us know how it goes in the Comments below!
Doing something dangerous? Get that liability waiver ready!
By Cody Curry · June 28th, 2016
You’ve set up an awesome, fun, and extremely dangerous event. You want everyone you know to participate, but you don’t want to shoulder this massive liability (smart thinkin’!)—enter the waiver form.
A waiver is a document that illustrates an individual’s surrender of particular rights. Similar to a disclaimer, waivers are a complex document and they shouldn’t be taken lightly. Talk to your lawyer when drafting a waiver. We’re not lawyers so don’t assume any of our examples here represents legal advice in any shape or form. Got it? Good. Let’s get to building a form then, eh?
When signing a waiver, it’s important to include a copy for your terms and the rights that the individual is surrendering when they sign. Generally, we would suggest using a Section Break field for this. Section Break fields let you include text or HTML without adding an extra input field to your form. An unfortunate side-effect of using a Section Break on a waiver form is that the text you include won’t be sent along to your user, and won’t be included in the Notifications you receive.
To make sure you and your users get a copy of the waiver for both of your records, we suggest using our CSS keyword cloak. Cloak is and often misunderstood CSS Keyword. “Hide an input field?! Why would I want to do that on a form, y’all crazy”.
Well, sometimes yes. We’re going to use the CSS Keyword cloak to hide the input field for a regular old Single-Line-Text field. First, paste all that text you had in your Section Break over in the Field Label of a Single Line Text field. Once that’s done, add the CSS Layout Keyword cloak.
Field labels will always appear within the Notification emails, as long as that field’s input field contains data. To ensure it always contains data, add a bit of pre-defined text to that single line text field to ensure it shows up in every email. Since that field is hidden, your users won’t be able to see or change it. We usually use something like [placeholder] so it’s easy to identify. Another option is to simply include a period as the pre-defined value.
This will give you a section of static text without an input box, kinda like our Section Break. The text will be included in Notification emails, as well as within the Entry Manager.
To include a copy of that waiver for your users, click on the Form Settings tab, and enable your Confirmation Email. When customizing that email, check the Include copy of form data checkbox. Your customer will then receive a copy of the waiver and all of its juicy legal pitfalls.
That’s the gist of how to create a waiver form in Wufoo! Here’s the example we just created for your reference too.
Stay safe out there, form fans and see you next time.
Questions for Cody? You know where to go.
8 Ways to collect more form entries - for free
By Praveen Chandran · June 27th, 2016
You took time to design a great form. You applied the right colors, logo, background image. You tried out our new themes to make your forms even more smashing.
But, wait. You don’t have enough entries. Ugh, how can this be?? Don’t worry, you’re of course not alone.
All of us share our forms to whatever channels make the most sense to us—whether it’s to our website, our company’s website or social media. How do we know when and what channels to use? And are we also using the channels the right way to get more form entries? Well, you’re in luck because that’s what this post is for, ladies and gents.
Let’s review—consider this a cheat sheet if you will, of form distribution channels at your fingertips. *Pro Tip: Not every channel in this cheat sheet is applicable to every type of form. In other words, treat this as a reference list only.
- Email – An oldie but a goodie. One of the best ways to grab immediate attention to your form is by sharing the link in a personalized email to your friends and target audience in your contact list. As you share your form with your friends, make a subtle request to share your form with any email groups that they see fit. Additionally, if you are aware of targeted email groups that are closed for public access, reach out to your friends who are part of those groups and request them to post it on your behalf.
- Messaging apps – Running a personal event? Organizing the company holiday party and need to get RSVPs faster? Look no further than the set of messaging apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. Each have a huge user base and chances are that most of your friends and colleagues use at least one of these apps.
- Facebook – Facebook groups and Facebook business pages have recently taken over email groups. Are you part of a Facebook group with a large group of members? Do you or your friends own a Facebook page with a good number of followers? Consider posting in these groups or Facebook pages, just be sure your form’s purpose is relevant of course.
- Twitter – The little blue bird is a great channel to promote your form. But before you do, conduct a quick analysis first on popular hashtags that are relevant to your form’s goal. For example, if you are running an event, look for hashtags relevant to local events that have a lot of posts in the recent past. Use these hashtags in your tweet to get the most number of views for your tweet and your form. Before you tweet, reach out to friends in your network and request them to like and retweet your original tweet. Don’t be shy either. Post your tweet during different times of the day (8 a.m., 2 p.m., 8 p.m.) A lot of people tend to login to Twitter only during specific times of the day like say, on the commute home or when they first wake up. Posting multiple times a day gives your tweet a better chance of being viewed and even better, shared.
- LinkedIn - LinkedIn groups are a great way to reach professional audience for lead gen campaigns and for promoting professional events. It’s usually a good idea to give out something (like a downloadable case study or a free e-book) to increase the chances of LinkedIn members filling out your form. Make sure groups and discussion forums are still active. Always read the group’s guidelines before you post your request. Some groups have explicit instructions to post such requests only under “promotions” category. Other groups frown upon such promotional posts altogether. Violating group principles is a great way to get banned from the group permanently—don’t be one of those guys. Learn more on how to share your forms on LinkedIn.
- Influencers – One of the best ways to get a lot of entries is through influencer marketing. If you know of any major influencers in a niche within your network, request them to share your form link on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. When you make a request, give the influencer a strong reason to promote your form (for example—help out a charity group by promoting a charity event). Influencers are rare gems so you don’t want to reach out with trivial requests. Also, chances are your request will be promptly turned down or worse and far more likely, ignored.
- Reddit – Reddit has become the go-to-place for a lot of readers for everything from getting latest news to reading content on topic of their choice like startups and marketing. Identify one or more channels that your target audience is likely to frequent. Never been on Reddit before? You need to “Karma” which is equivalent to credits, before you can start sharing posts of your own. Reddit clearly wants you to contribute to the community before you can reap the benefits. Reddit users also have the ability to “downvote” a post. So! Read the channel guidelines before you share a form to avoid being banned. As long as the form is relevant to the audience, you’re likely to get a good number of entries.
- Be viral – Add a social sharing widget in the form’s end page (AKA Thank You page of your form) and encourage your users to share your form’s link. Often, users look forward to sharing with their friends and colleagues on social media that they’re attending an event immediately after they sign up. Enabling this possibility by embedding a social sharing widget would let users do the work for you and bring in more form entries. Here’s how you can add social media sharing options to your confirmation page.
Keep this cheat sheet by your side when you’re ready to share that sweet form of yours. We’ll update as we go too, promise!
Have your own best practices for each channel? Help out your fellow Wufoo form creators and leave a comment below.
Well, Hello cc: and bcc - New Feature!
By Praveen Chandran · June 16th, 2016Notifications, notifications, notifications. They’re key to staying on top of your form entries after you deploy a form.
You want to know as soon as the entries start rushin’ on in. Why? So you can take fast action on all those hot entries of yours, of course. Thus far, you’ve probably relied on setting up basic email and text notifications. Or maybe a notification based on the value of a form entry, oooorr even get custom notifications using our Webhooks integration.
So guess what? We’ve kicked up our notifications capabilities up a notch. Say hello to cc and bcc capabilities, form fans. You can find these handy little fields in Form Settings for confirmation emails, notifications (when you use “customize notification email” option) and in Form Rules.
Now it’s guide time! Read. And learn.
2 quick tips for making your notifications more awesome with cc/bcc
Mark the special email address of your CRM like Salesforce in bcc of your notification or confirmation email so that it gets recorded towards the appropriate lead or contact in the CRM. Most top CRMs support this email forwarding feature with special email addresses.
Send the notification email or confirmation email to specific team members in cc or bcc. These emails can also be based on pre-defined values in the form rules to help with simple workflow management within your team.
Now cc/bcc on! Let us know what you think.
Please share your use cases of using cc and bcc with us in the Comments section.
Using CSS to Maximize Your Form’s Max Quantities
By Kane Stanley · June 2nd, 2016The Max Quantities feature is one of our more recent releases and we reckon it’s a bit fantastic. It’s a nifty little one that allows you to limit the number of times an option can be picked in a form. If a customer is filling out a field with this applied, they’ll see exactly how many times that option can be picked. It’ll look a little bit like this:
Not too shabby, eh? However, not everyone would be a fan of showing how many t-shirts they have left. It’s not possible to directly get rid of the text showing this, but being the superhero that it is, CSS is around to save the day. With CSS it’s possible to target that piece of text, shoot it with some laser eyes and send it fleeing from the form. Or to avoid the action scene metaphor, it’s possible to hide it. The CSS is mega simple as well. Check it out:
Not a massive amount to talk about with that. The colour of the text has just been made transparent, which will make it disappear from the form. When applied, it’ll look like this:
Looks like CSS has defeated the villain with one swift and beautiful move. All of those options still have the max quantities applied, but only small shirts, which have run out of stock will show the amount remaining. That way the user isn’t a bit confused when they can’t pick the small shirt they so desperately want. The same fate would be in store for the other shirts, if they were to run out of stock.
What’s that? You want the text for out of stock options to be gone as well and you need CSS to cancel its holiday to help you again? That’s chill. Just add a tiny bit more CSS. Check it out:
You will notice when the option has been disabled and will once again hide the text from the form. When applied, it’ll look like this:
Another job well done for CSS. Saving lives one character at a time!
Questions for Kane? You know where to go!
Celebrating 10 Years: Announcing New Themes
By Praveen Chandran · June 2nd, 2016Yep, it’s official.
We just completed 10 years of happily serving our customers and we look forward to serving you for many more years in the future. Our 10th year anniversary was made even more special thanks to this.
Again, thanks tons for giving us the opportunity to serve you. To kick celebrations off, we’ve started rolling out a series of changes that’ll help you create even more awesome forms for whatever your needs may be.
So let’s get to it—hello, Themes. Selecting a designed Theme for your form not only dazzles things up for your customers but it can help build trust—just another reason for them to willingly fill out your form, and we’ve got six new themes for you to choose from.
Fonts are bigger and easier to read and on mobile. Rounded corners, razor-sharp edges, no borders, new colors, shadowing—there are a bunch of different design tactics we developed to make your forms stand out. Here’s where to find them:
Take a gander at Kingfisher and Periwinkle:
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And because we’re Wufoo wizards, these new themes will magically appear among your list of existing Themes. If you’re in a rush though, pick just one and make your form look great.
Never explored how to customize logos? Or adding your own custom Theme? You know what to do—click both those hyperlinks and get going, form fans. Heads-up: These six new themes can’t be customized when using our Themes Manager. Minor formatting challenges may pop up if you use with custom themes keywords. Why? It’s not considered a best practice to use columns in form design.
This is just the beginning of many more cha-cha-changes to be expected from Wufoo, including additional Themes, so please stay tuned.
As always, we’d love to hear from you. Leave questions, comments, or your fave memes in the Comments below.
Announcing Updates to Form Manager
By Praveen Chandran · May 23rd, 2016Form Manager is one of the core parts of Wufoo with which you interact every day. When you logged into your Wufoo account today, you may have noticed a few significant changes in the Form Manager. Trust us—that’s intentional!
We chose to give a long overdue refresh (or makeover if you will) to the Form Manager. Doing this also set the stage for a series of additional changes and new features in the Form Manager still to come. Keep us honest with that and keep an eye on your Form Manager or here on the blog in the next few months for update tidbits.
So you may be saying to yourself—if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Don’t worry, we’re a fan of that motto too. You’ve let us serve you with fantastic form service for the past 10 (eep!) years so as a big fat Thank You—we’re helping you get to your most favorite form functions even faster. Faster is better.
Now let’s dive into all this change, shall we? Hit it.
1. Bigger everything
Over the last 10 years, the dinosaurs at Wufoo have grown bigger and so have the size of your monitors. However, Form Manager has always remained small leaving plenty of prime real estate un-used. That changes now. We chose to expand the size of the Form Manager. Along the way, we also made the fonts bigger so that you don’t have to go searching for a magnifying glass when looking at our Form Manager.
2. Reminders on form status
You have a business to run, customers to focus on and other important things to take care of. We get it. So, to help you be more productive without remembering the little details, we added noticeable reminders to forms that have not been shared yet. These reminders will help get your forms in front of your customers and start collecting data on your end even sooner.
3. Visual indicators
As you’re scanning through the list of forms, in the past, it was hard to differentiate between public and private forms. Hello to today! Now you have two visual indicators to scan and pick out private forms much faster. 1. The form icon will be grayed out for private forms. 2. The share option will be grayed out and will not be clickable for private forms. Fast and furious indeed!
4. No more “hover over”
Some of you have said that it’s distracting to have the form options pop-up even when you casually hover over form name. Additionally, the need to hover over to view form options made the experience cumbersome in tablets. We got rid of the requirement to hover over and instead display the menu options right next to the form name. Boom—faster navigation when on desktop and using tablets.
5. All your favorites grouped under “Edit”
Edit, view, rules, notifications and integrations are the options most accessed by our users. Grouping them together under Edit menu would help you get to these most-used options much more quickly.
6. “More” really does give you more value
In the past, you had to get to the share page in order to access API information. In other words, the access to API was tricky. Come on, this is not a treasure hunt. The API information and other important features like duplicate, delete, make a form private or public and add password (only for public forms) now live under the More menu.
7. Get to your entries faster
You do all the hard work creating, designing and deploying your forms to collect data. Shouldn’t you be able to get to this data quickly? The Entries menu is here to serve all your data and analytics needs. With the options in this menu, you should be able to get to form analytics and view all the form entries.
We also display the total number of entries and number of entries today right next to the form name. Yep, one less click to get to stats on entries.
8. Future changes
These changes are just the beginning, form fans. They’re meant to be stepping stones towards adding important features like organizing forms into folders, taking bulk actions on forms and more. Again, keep an eye out.
Our goal is to make creation and deployment of form with Wufoo fast, fun and easy. We believe these changes and the updates planned in the near future will help accomplish this objective. We definitely like to hear your thoughts on these changes. Please share your thoughts, comments and suggestions with us!
