If you are looking for a good place for form templates, check out Free Church Forms. They have templates for all areas of church ministry. They are initially in PDF form, but the site suggests you go to PDF2Word Online to convert the files to a Word document.
Earlier in the year, I posted about Jot Form, a free “What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) online survey generator. Another tool you may want to check out is Zoho Creator. Zoho is another WYSIWYG form/database creator, but I think that it has a little bit better interface for when you look at submitted data and the free version also includes a file uploader, which is a little easier to manage than Jotform.
You may use these for program evaluations, parent feedback, as volunteer recruitment tools, or to register participants in your ministries. They are both very good form generators. I actually prefer Jotform, I think it is easier to use overall, but wanted to make sure you knew about this one as well in case you liked the interface better.
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How many of you evaluate your volunteers? If you do, great! If not, I’ve got a little tool you can use…as always…free of charge!
This coming Sunday, my Sunday School Coordinator (Amy you are the best!) and I are going to start doing 2 minute walk throughs in each classroom. The object is for us to pop into the room, get an idea of what is going on in the 4 areas of: Teacher, Kids, Content, and Environment, and provide a bit of feedback for the teachers.
At first, I thought evaluating teachers was going to be more difficult than wiping cheese doodle dust off of my 3 year old’s face, but I had a stunning idea. At a meeting to kick off the new school year, I decided to present the 4 key areas of evaluation and the 2 minute walk through concept to the teachers. They liked it, so I asked them to identify the individual points in each area they would like us to evaluate them on. 10 minutes later and I had a “teacher generated” evaluation tool! The burden was not on me, it was now on them because they came up with it!
The plan is to pop into each room about 6-7 times per year. I’ve told them to also use the form (which will be hanging on a clipboard by their lightswitch) as a self evaluation form or to have a friend come in, observe, and complete the evaluation for them. This is just a new and small step in generating greater excellence and accountability in the efforts of my volunteers.
You can download the document here on the Volunteer Training page. It’s a Word document that you can feel free to adjust. No copyrights on this one!
What about you? What do you do to evaluate your volunteers?
If you have not stepped into the world of online registration for your ministries, then JotForm is the site to get you started! Having parents sign up for your camps, VBS or summer events online can really save you a lot of administrative paperwork and headaches. I mean, why should you input all of that computer data? Let the participants do it.
With Jotform’s basic (translated free) edition, you will most likely not push its limitations. With the free version, you obviously get no technical support apart from the forums, but you get 100 submissions per month, 10 MB of uploading, downloading results in various formats and the ability to run secure financial transactions (i.e. PayPal, etc.). Of course if you feel that your needs would exceed the allowances for the free version, you can pay $9/month for the more versatile account. I have been using Survey Monkey for some of these same purposes and paying around $19/month.
Something about JotForm that amazes me is its user-friendliness. All of the form creation is drag and drop. It allows you to email the forms, code them into your website, display real time results of the results on your site (for polls) or link registrants to a web page containing your survey/form.
A tool like this is handy for a variety of functions. You can certainly use it for registrations, but other uses could include:
Can you think of other uses? Know of any other free tools similar to this one? Let us know by commenting below!
