It’s at this time of year that churches start to encourage their members to get into a Bible study/Connect/Community group. Organising groups can be a messy and time-intensive process as you distribute forms, people complete the forms, hand the forms back in and then the hard job starts - assigning people to groups and trying to meet everyone’s expectations for the groups they want to be in (and want to stay out of!).

Thankfully, there is an easier way.

In a word, this way is Wufoo. It’s a very straightforward (and non-technical) way of creating all kinds of forms, collecting information and then viewing the results. You can take a tour of the features of Wufoo here. I’ve written about Wufoo on several ocassions, but if you’re unfamiliar with it, you might like to start with ‘10 reasons why Wufoo is better than Google Docs’. And remember - churches get 50% off the monthly rate.

Today I want to show you in five steps how you can use Wufoo to streamline the sign-up process for the Bible study groups at your church.

1. Sign-up for an account with Wufoo. You can create up to 3 forms for free, or the 50% monthly discount (above).

2. Once you’re logged-in, click on the link to ‘new form’.

3. Use the buttons on the left to add fields you would like to include in your form. For example, if you would like to have a space for someone to fill in their name, drag the ‘name’ button across into your form.

4. Once you have finished adding the fields you require, you can then save the form and distribute it. Wufoo provides a link so you can send the form to people via email, or you can place some code on your church website for people to fill in the form there. It also prints nicely, if you’d like to provide a hard copy version for people to fill-in at church.

5. When it comes time to collate the responses and assign people to groups, you can then export all of the responses into an Excel spreadsheet, making it super-easy to start the process of assigning people to groups. If you like, you can also set it up to receive an email each time someone completes the form.

To show you what the finished product looks like, I’ve created a sample form, based on a form I’ve created for my church. It took me 15 minutes to pull this together - click here to view the sample form.

Do you think this process would work at your church? Why or why not? How does your church coordinate the process of getting people into Bible study groups? Got a suggestion for how this process could be made easier?