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Wufoo makes online forms easy
Some readers here may know that I've started writing over at the Web 2.0 review site TechCrunch. One new service that I wrote about this week stood out as something that could be very useful for nonprofits. It's called Wufoo and it's an easy way to make online forms that can be inserted into your web page or used as separate pages. It is very flexible and honestly takes very little technical knowledge.
I'm sure that many organizations can imagine uses for easy to build online forms. This system makes it very easy to build any kind of form you can imagine. The finished product sits in an iFrame, a little box on your web page that users can interact with without having to reload the whole page. The look and feel can be highly customized to fit in nicely with the rest of your site. A web page interface lets you set all up all the fields in form and then provides a code snippet to copy and paste into your site.
Responses to your forms can be delivered by either email or RSS and the data can be displayed online (public or private). That data is also easy to export to an excel or CSV file on your desktop.
There is a free level of the service, but if you really want to make use of a Wufoo form on a high traffic site you'll want to get one of the premium levels of service.
Like most online "software as a service" that's coming out these days, Wufoo is relatively affordable and is easy for the company to update quickly and often without any trouble on the users' part.
If you work on a web site that you'd like to make more interactive and functional without a lot of programming knowledge or time invested, creating forms in Wufoo is one more way you can easily do that.
If you're interested in learning more, here's my review of Wufoo on TechCrunch. That write up includes more information about the company and a discussion with readers following the post.
Comments
Wufoo is dissappointing if you have user data
We have a paid subscription to Wufoo. The forms are nice, and easy to use. It integrated well for our use, however because of the amount of data, Wufoo can neither display nor allow an export of the data. Now we're stuck. We have the user results from a survey that we cannot access. The first time I contacted technical support, they responded the next day, and said "edit the survey." On the follow-up saying that "your solution does not work" there has been no reply for two days. At this point Wufoo is a worthless solution. If you are going to have 500 or 1,000 responses, Wufoo is a nice and easy to use solution. If you are going to have more than 10,000 responses, beware!
Update #1 Wufoo Disappointment - Graphs
Wufoo has the ability to create visual elements. The bar and pie graphs are visually very appealing, and when looking at the reports on-line, the appearance is neat and organized. The downside is that you cannot choose whether the graphs show the number of results or the percentage of responses. In the Pie Graph, it shows the percentage. In the Bar and Line graphs, it only shows the number of responses. Visually you can see the relative position, however the graph should also give you the percentage. Instead for the Bar and Line graphs, you get the number of responses, and then you have to add all of the responses, and divide this category to see the percentage. In this user's opinion, this is a big oversight. In a graph, you want to see the percentage change or the percentage of one category to others.
Wufoo Review
There's another, somewhat more technical review of Wufoo, several screen captures, and a live data-entry form at http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/wufoo-challenges-infopath-for-form.html.