 so thank you all for joining us. This is a Ontario chapter event for TechSoupConnect and I am Sandra Amar and I'm your local TechSoupConnect host here for the Ontario area. I'm not sure where we have everyone from if you're all from the Ontario area, some of you are from somewhere else. We do have a global network for Tech for Good Meetups all across the world. If you like feel free to tell us a bit about yourself in the chat and maybe where you're from say hello. We are a non-profit that help other non-profits to get implemented and use tech effectively so hopefully that's why you're here today and a little bit about our community values. We welcome everyone and we always put our community first so we're all here to support each other and to grow stronger non-profits and we use technology as one of our tools to be able to do that and I love to have people participate and I know it's a little bit difficult when we're online but I love to hear from you if you have any feedback on these events if there's anything specific you'd like me to try to find or if you have something you would like to present on or participate with please let me know and obviously we love to treat each other with kindness and respect and we have Boren Zaza here or born from you're the communication director at Orchestras Canada welcome nice to meet you and I see we have Catherine here as well and I'm sure a few other people trickle in as we continue so at TechSoup Connect we need your help we're always looking for people to produce events or take care of marketing we don't really take too many notes in this kind of webinar environment but anyone who's interested in helping plan an event like I mentioned please reach out to me I'd be happy to hear about that let me just get my hair there we go okay so a little bit more about TechSoup for any of you who may be new to TechSoup we help connect TechSoup helps connect you with donated and discounted products and there's a whole bunch of items that they can help you source and get at a discounted rate including software hardware projectors hot spots and also refurbished hardware lots of great things for you there and these are just a few of the examples of the some of the vendors and service providers that TechSoup works with that you can get discounted items from and a great comparison so if you are with TechSoup and a non-profit this is a comparison if you were a non-profit with 10 staff members as to the savings you can actually see by using TechSoup for in this case this kind of suite that they've put together as an example and as you can see that's a significant cost savings for a yearly subscription fee if you need additional tech help there is a form on TechSoup.org where you can ask questions and look for answers for anything related to non-profit tech that can help you build a better organization so feel free to check that out at forums.techsoup.org and as you probably I'm not sure if you came across this event through Meetup or through our new event platform but all of our events are listed on events.techsoup.org and this event here is being hosted by myself for the Ontario chapter but there are several other chapters out there as well that are also doing other virtual events that you may want to go and check out and moving along so this event today is brought to you by me at all of the systems and I'll talk a bit more about what I do a little bit later and our agenda for today so you're all here today to see my presentation on capturing information in the cloud so we're going to be looking at Google Forms and how you can create better forms and capture data so that you can use it. Hi Eli and at the end of our presentation we're going to have a one-minute community update so if you're still on our call at the end you will have some time to let us know what new and interesting things you're up to because we all know you're doing some amazing things out there so I'd love to hear about it and I'm sure others would love to hear about it if you are willing to share. So moving along we're before we get to today's event our next upcoming event is currently scheduled for October although I have a feeling we'll probably plug in a few more events between now and then but this is what we have on the calendar right now I'm presenting this one as well to help you learn how to create a virtual onboarding program using free tools it's something that I've been working with lately so I thought it would be great to share with you guys as well and I think we've already seen the slides so I'm going to switch over to our presentation. Can you guys still see my slides? My slides you should see it's loaded you should see Google Forms slide now capturing data in the cloud hopefully that's good hi Eli all right so we're going to talk about Google Forms and capturing data in the cloud so let me I'll turn off my camera so you can see the slides better I think and I will try to keep it oh did I lose my slides we've got some fabulous pool background yeah that's my winter vacation spot all right hopefully you see it now we're on our objective okay second there we go okay all these boxes I need to rearrange one second yes you're my cheerleader Eli I love that all right so today we're going to be learning some tips and tricks on how to use Google Forms effectively to collect responses and data and information in the cloud and many of the tips that you're going to learn here today could be applied to other forms and collection tools as well but we will be doing a specific look at Google Forms and how to actually use it so this is our agenda for today to cover so we'll look and learn a bit about Google Forms and some tips on how to create good forms and we will then jump into Google Forms and start creating some forms and learning about how to collect responses and as well as some of the advanced features that are available with Google Forms and then we'll wrap it up with some resources and any questions you may have and we will try to squeeze in some community updates there as well at the end for you guys to share what you guys have been working on so let's get started with Google Forms a little bit about Google Forms it's a survey administration software that is included in the Google software suite so in Google with Google Workspace or what was previously known as G Suite and it's also available as part of the free Google offering so if you have a free at Gmail account you can also create your own Google Forms through there as well it basically allows you to collect information from users through surveys and that collected information is automatically entered into a spreadsheet on Google Sheets so that you can then use that information in other ways for whatever you need some of the benefits are really that it is a great way to get answers fast either from you know your donors your volunteers whoever you need to get information from it's a great quick way to get that information online and it's also mobile friendly and very responsive so you're able to use it with any applications you can also customize it with your own obviously your own questions you can create and there's a whole bunch of different question types that we'll look at as well and you can also add images and YouTube videos or you can get fancy with branching your questions and using skip logic to kind of skip over questions if you need to with different streams and finally you can also share your responses and get them in a very neat and automated way through the form so that you can get real-time responses into information like charts for example or you can view it all in sheets as well so as I mentioned you can use google forms through your free at gmail google account or you can use it through a google workspace account so the difference with google workspace is it's usually a subscription service however google for non-profits gets you access to google workspace for free so if that's what you're using then you do have a few added benefits when you're using google forms through your free google for non-profits workspace account there aren't that many differences but I did want to point them out just so you're aware one of the great benefits of having google workspace is that you can use you can create templates for your own organization so if it's a form that you know may need to be tweaked every month perhaps and updated you may want to create a template for your organization so that it can be reused all the time you can also duplicate duplicate existing forms if you need to in order to modify them slightly but having the templates in one space is easier when you're working with multiple people because then you can all access the same template and not accidentally override that original version another benefit or difference between using google workspace and a free gmail account is that you can restrict the form to only be filled out by people within your organization so if you're creating forms that are only internal so you know perhaps you're doing something like a maybe an expense report type of thing that you're including that you're using google forms for you can ensure that the form is only accessed by somebody who is in your google workspace account the other difference is if you're using chromebooks as part of your organization which is really only applicable to schools which may not be the case for most nonprofits but you can turn on a locked mode for chromebooks so that the respondents can't open other tabs so this would be most likely used if you're using it for tests or quizzes but that's those were the only differences really that are there between google for nonprofits yes Eli you're right so if you do restrict it to your own organization then you won't be able to share it with anyone publicly that is right so you have to you do have to be careful and and it would be a very specific use case I think in that case okay so with surveys and forms you really need to be clear as to what information you're collecting in order to make it truly effective so some forms may need to have a lot of questions but make sure you really need each of those questions so you want to ask with every question that you're adding to your form or survey you want to make sure that it really has value and that you know what you're going to do with the response so sometimes you know you might ask think to ask a whole lot of questions but do you really need that information adding too many questions will you know discourage the person who's filling it out as well as you know probably not have not give you the correct answers that they want to give because they're just going to get tired of filling out a whole bunch of forms so be very careful when you're creating your form so that you only ask what you really need and the other thing is you really want to ask only one question at a time so you can for example let's say you need to collect somebody's name do you really need to ask it ask for first name and last name separately or do you just need to know somebody's name so that you know how to refer to them as it it just helps reduce the number of times that somebody needs to enter in information so you may just want customer name as opposed to first and last name and another kind of example as to how to ask one question at a time and it's really sorry my dog's excited if you really want to ask one question at a time so for example in with drop-down responses or yes or no questions if you ask something like an open-ended question like did you find the presentation useful and entertaining that's really actually two questions it's it sounds like it might be one but you know for example me as a respondent I may have found that presentation very entertaining but I didn't find it useful at all but I won't be able to answer yes or no to that question because there's different answers to it so you want to be careful with how you phrase your question so that you are truly asking only one question so that you can just get that one response and with all of your questions you really want to be as direct as possible so that the person who's answering your question knows exactly what you're asking for so an example here is you know if you were to ask our is our organization better than other charities that's a really open and vague question that's going to get you a whole bunch of different responses a better way to kind of narrow that down is to really think about what kind of response you're really looking for and you might want to ask and said what do you think makes us better than our than competing charities maybe just to really be specific and direct as to what you're asking it helps give you helps ensure that the respondents giving you good responses okay so we'll move on to the next tip here you really want to keep your forms easy to read and one thing to keep in mind is that you don't want to use too many acronyms or any technical or industry jargon that might only be known to a specific set of people so I know a lot of this happens in the it world and I'm sure every industry has some acronyms that people take for granted but if you have new respondents and people who are new to your organization or new to the industry they may not know what they stand for so you want to make sure you spell out any acronyms so that people actually know what it is you're asking for in case they don't know what it is or maybe they've forgotten or and you don't want them to confuse it with a different acronym as well right another tip is to make sure you create a flow with your questions so if you start with easy questions it gives the respondent a more incentive I guess to keep going until they get to the harder questions but if you put those hard questions that really make them think at the beginning they're less likely to fill out information you want to try not to use questions that are too difficult in the first place you want to make it easy for them to understand but having a nice flow to your form you know so starting with your basic questions you know what are your names what what's your name your email you know any demographic data that you may want to collect keep those easy questions first and then flow into more thought-provoking questions as you go go on another tip in order to keep it easy to to read is to use sections so that you don't have you know a hundred questions on the first page of your form because it can be intimidating to somebody who's filling it out to see all those questions and then think oh I don't know if I really have time to do all this so using sections kind of breaks it down and allows them to kind of break their thoughts into smaller chunks the same way you would with the form right and the other benefit with sections is that you can also redirect respondents to different sections based on previous questions so for example if you're asking your volunteers you know what area would you like what municipality would you like to volunteer in and you have a list of cities and say you have Toronto and Brampton and Ottawa whatever cities you may have and you need to collect additional information only if they respond to with Toronto as an option you can then direct anybody who responds to with the answer Toronto to that question to a specific set of sub questions without needing everybody else to also go through those questions when it's not relevant to them at all so having that form designed in a useful way and using sections in that way will create a nice flow so that your respondents will find it easy to fill out another tip I have when creating forms is to think about the answers when you phrase the questions and we touched a bit on this earlier you want to keep the end in mind when you're creating your forms so read the question and the possible answers that you've provided especially if you're using multiple choice or think about open-ended answers so read it multiple times and try to think if there's different ways to interpret the question or to see if you're leading the responded to answer the question in a certain way so an example of that maybe you know if there's a question of you know do you agree with half the population that winter is the worst season that kind of question leads you leads the respondent to want to agree with the majority or you know that winter is the worst even though you're saying that the other half don't think it's the worst it might lead them to agree so a better way to phrase that question would be to possibly word it as a multiple choice and say which season do you think is the worst and then list each season so that they would have to make the selection so it removes some bias to the way you phrase the questions and you can also have different response types so you want to consider how you're going to use the information when you receive it to decide what kind of response types you want so when i'm talking about response types i'm talking about the different types of fields that there may be so you may use open text fields or you may use drop down fields or multiple choice or you may be able to select multiple responses so if you're you know if you ask something like what is your favorite color and you leave the responses open text you know one person might spell orange one way somebody might spell it with a capital somebody might do lowercase somebody might misspell it somebody might say their favorite colors tangerine not orange which means you're going to get a whole bunch of different responses that if you need to do any sort of data on like any charts or calculations or reporting on those responses you won't be able to do that without massaging and cleaning up all the data that came in so a better way would be to either use a drop down or have check boxes where they can select their answers so that the data responses are always similar and validation can also help with the responses you get to make sure that you're getting the right kind of answers so for example if you were looking to submit a form for have a volunteer submit a form and they needed to have a certification within a certain number of years past for example and you want the year to be four digits long and that the certification should be relevant within the past 10 years for example you can put the validation on the response that only allows the user to enter a number that is greater than you know 2011 for example so that'll eliminate any responses where somebody may only enter the last two digits of the year because they're forced to enter the four and then it helps you validate that text and or that number and you can use that for reporting as well and there's a whole bunch of different types of validation as well you can even validate the that the text response is an email address for example and a whole bunch of different validations but validation is really useful to make sure you get the information you want okay so another very very important part and having worked in it for a long time and a very long time privacy is very very important so in general you want to make sure you're only collecting private information if you really really really need it and and if you do you really need to make sure you're following all of the rules and regulations around the office of the privacy commissioner of canada as well and i have a link there at the bottom that you can review to make sure that you're being compliant with anything you need to be compliant with but basically you know for the most part you you know some people may want to collect a date of birth because they want to maybe send some send their volunteers a birthday card or their donors a birthday card or reminder when their birthday comes around you don't necessarily have to ask for their specific date of birth in that case you can just ask them for their month of birth that way you can you know send them a birthday card that month and not have to get their entire birth date okay all right another tip once you've designed your form and you've looked it over and you've you know gone through all the tips that i recommended you really want to test with a pilot group if you can so test with a few people if you have some you know volunteers or even just other co-workers or staff members anybody or anybody from that kind of group you can have them test the form and see what kind of responses you get out of them so that'll help you to validate if you're capturing the right information or if you missed anything it also helps with getting a second set of eyes to do spell check and capture any errors that you might have found so that wraps up some of the tips and tricks I have for generally creating forms and hopefully you found that useful if you do have any questions feel free to pop them in the chat as we go I'll try to keep an eye out otherwise I'm happy to answer your questions at the end so for now we're going to go through creating forms in Google Forms I am not 100% sure if we'll have time to do a live demo but everything I have on the slides here are screenshots from Google Forms so we should you should be able to you know get enough information here that you need in order to have a good understanding of Google Forms and I will try to sneak some live demo in at the end if I can all right so to start you need to create a new form so if you are creating a new form from Google Drive you can click on Drive in your Google Drive folder and you can then go down to more if you need to to find Google Forms and select Google Forms you can also select or create new forms by going to your Google Launchpad and selecting Google Forms from there as well so you have two different options when you're creating a new form you can use a template if you have one so if you can see there you see Toronto Area Chapter 1 it says parent you can click on that side to get any of your organization's templates that you've saved or there's a whole bunch of templates that Google has made available under the general tab so these are a few of the different ones that they have if you need an idea of where to start with or how to lay something out this is a great place to start once you create a new form you'll have a basic form with just the one question and it'll say untitled form and this is kind of where you start and one of the places where I like to start is to pick a theme so you can choose an image for your header and it'll appear at the top header part of your form and if you click on choose image you'll see I believe there's a few defaults available but you can also upload your own if I'm not mistaken which is handy for customizing it making it more relevant to your organization you can change your theme color your background color and your font although the font selections they have are not great I stick with the basic because it seems to be the most professional feeling one the other fonts available or a little bit kiddish in my opinion but they work you can also change your colors from the top panel over here that's where you can go to open your theme and now we'll talk a little bit about the layout here so in the the right section over here this is where you can go to add different elements to your form so you can add text headings you can add pictures you can add a youtube video and the bottom one there with the two rectangular bars is your sections so this is what you would use to break up your form so that you only show a few questions at a time on each page and you would scroll through each section if you needed to break up your form a bit so what we were talking about before if you know if you wanted to split it out so that somebody who responded to Toronto goes to a different section this is where you would make that break between all the questions and I that's the one I will try to show you if we have time at the end when you are adding questions to your form you have a whole bunch of different types of fields that you can add to your form so your short answer field is for a short line of text and your paragraph will allow you to add more text like a paragraph multiple choice is useful when you want the user to select only one of many options and see all the options at the same time checkboxes are useful when you want your respondent to be able to select multiple responses at the same time drop down field is very similar to the multiple choice in the way that you're going to get a response but it just displays differently so you can only select one as well but you only see one at a time unless you open the drop down field file upload is also another option that you can add to your form so this might be handy if maybe you're using the form to collect maybe you're recruiting staff and you're using it as a recruitment intake form or a uh onboarding form where you want the user to upload maybe a policy statement they've signed or maybe you want somebody to upload their resume or cover letter you can use that here as well or maybe you need them to upload a profile picture depending obviously what you're using your form for but they can upload files scales and grids are a way to capture kind of a range of data so i think we've all kind of seen the linear one where you know you know on the far left side is something you don't agree with and the far right side is something you highly agree with and you can pick your answer based on a scale of information uh so that's useful for ranking information and the multiple choice grid is similar to the linear scale but you can add multiple items at once uh in one grid as opposed to having to repeat the linear scale each time and the checkbox grid is similar um but obviously you can make multiple choices per line instead of just one where you which is uh what you would have with the multiple choice and the other two types are the date field and the time field uh somebody's asking here about the file upload does the user need to have a google account i've had that problem before i had to use a third party and i believe you're correct i believe you do need to have a google account in order to upload a file um i'm pretty sure you're correct on that uh so yes you made and i know the same is true with other um some other apps as well i'm pretty sure microsoft forums uh have the same issue uh or it could be an organizational setting i can look into that and double check for you but i am pretty sure that with google you do need to have a um a google account in order to upload okay uh so those are the different questions that you can add to your form uh oh yes sorry i was just looking at my notes again um you can only allow uh it will only allow users with the google account to fill out the form so that is correct i did have that in my my speaker notes that i wasn't looking at um you also will not be able to okay so sorry if you use the file upload option uh only users with a google account can fill out the form you also will not be able to embed the form so if you were planning to embed the form on a um on your website for example as opposed to using it through a link you won't be able to embed it and if you do use the file upload option and sharing via link it will save the files to a folder on your google drive uh so hopefully that helps form facade okay cool all right so let's move along here uh oh so sorry that is the uh plus button that you would click on to get to add these additional fields so this is an example of working with the questions so this is an example of a multiple choice question so you can rearrange the uh questions by dragging and dropping them by clicking on this little uh six dot grid and you can drag them up and down the page in order to reorder them you can also duplicate a question that you've used before by clicking on the little copy button at the bottom and that's useful if you you know want to keep the same validations maybe or a lot of the same responses but need to rephrase that the question um that's can be really handy uh clicking on the trash icon obviously will move the question to uh trash so it'll remove it from your form if you have already um if you're editing an existing form and you delete the question it won't delete the responses from your back end spreadsheet if they've already been captured so just be aware of that that you won't lose that past history uh you'll have to go into the spreadsheet manually remove it you can also toggle the required um option on or off so the fields can either be required which means it's mandatory to be filled in in order for the person to complete the form and submit it um or you can turn it off uh so one thing to be aware of here is that if you are making a field required and but the person responding maybe has a different answer the question doesn't apply to them then you need to really make sure that you're able to capture that response or all responses otherwise you're going to end up with the user giving you dummy data um so you know maybe this question on the screen isn't the best example of it but perhaps maybe they're not a customer at all in this case maybe they're a volunteer um and this question doesn't apply to them if you force this question to be required they have no answer to select so they're going to pick one of these two and it's going to be wrong and it could skew with your data the addition so if you open the additional options in the little corner there there's additional options that'll pop up uh you'll be able it will look different for every field so it'll depend on what kind of field it is but that's where you can add additional validation um and there's a few different options depending on the field we'll be able to go into every specific one but uh that's where you would look so once we have um selected or created our form based on all those tips and tricks and rearranged our form the way we like it we can start to collect responses so the whole point in having a form is to be able to get that information in a clear and concise manner so that you can use it to accomplish whatever task you're trying to accomplish so in order to share the form you need to request that somebody fills them out so there's a few different ways you can share your form so you would typically start by clicking on the send button that's at the top right of the screen and that'll give you a few different options for sending and sharing the form with others uh so you have the option here to collect email addresses so if you are going to collect email addresses that will require a google login to complete the form so if you do need to capture someone's email address and you want to keep it open to non-google users assuming you don't need them to upload anything uh you can uh include it include the email address as a field on the form as a short text uh field and there's validation on the short text field to ensure that they're entering a email address so that would be the workaround for not collecting email addresses and forcing them to login via google so the first option here is to send via email so you can use this option here you can enter in the user's email address that you want to send it to and you know you can add a subject and the message and you can actually include the form right in the email and you can hit send and it will go to them so that's if you're sending one by one or you can uh paste multiple uh email addresses in there if you move over to the next tab you can send via a link and you can click on shorten url to make it a shorter easier link to copy and paste and then you can take this link and copy it and you can share it wherever you need to share it so you can share it in an email to whoever needs to respond to it you can share it online and anyone who clicks that link will come to your form and be able to fill it out the final way to share or send your form is to or not the final way but another way to send the form is to embed it so again this won't work if you're using the up if you're using file uploads you won't be able to embed the form but if you are not using that you can copy this code and paste it into the html section of your website to have it embedded right in your form um it can be hit and miss depending on how how your site is set up uh another recommendation is to use the link and tie it to a picture uh or a button on your form so that it opens in another page i just find it's a better user experience usually uh to go directly to the form rather than to work on it embedded uh but every situation is different so as long as it's not an incredibly long form you should be okay to embed it if you do have something that's more than i'd say you know 10 or 15 questions you might want to consider not embedding it and having them redirect to a link instead the other option you have for sending is to share directly to facebook or twitter so if you click these buttons you'll be able to uh share your form um directly to facebook and twitter a little box will pop up and allow you to uh post uh directly to facebook and twitter next is your responses so these um at the very top of the page you'll see questions and responses so if you click on the responses tab this is where you'll see uh all of your responses that come in and let me just keep moving here oh sorry i think i meant to uh do this in a live demo so we'll see if we can get there but um in the top right of that screen there you'll see a little spreadsheet icon the little green spreadsheet icon if you click on that that will open the google sheet that's directly related to this form and you'll see all of your responses in a spreadsheet form so there'll be a column for each question and all the responses will show up in the form under there as well and if you decide you need to turn off the form so you don't want to accept any more responses you can use that toggle button to turn it on or off under accepting responses and on the responses page there are three different sections and i'm not sure if i'll be able to get to them uh but there is a summary page that will kind of show you some graphs and grids for each of the uh uh questions that you've that have been asked and you can also look at it from a question to question basis or you can look at all the individual responses so you'll be able to scroll through all the individual forms that some somebody has uh sent in all right so i'm going to go through some of the more advanced features of google forms so you can add collaborators from the menu found at the top right corner of the page so it's similar to sharing uh you can do it from the send button as well there's an option there uh so you can add editors so that they can come and collaborate on the form with you or again under the three little dots if you scroll about halfway down you'll see add collaborators you can get there as well and again from the send button you can go to your settings okay sorry these are so these are your settings and this is where you can go to set settings that are specific to this form that you're working on so they won't apply to all forms that you've ever created it's just specifically for this form so the first tab is the general tab whoops uh and this is where you you can also select here whether or not you're going to collect email addresses the same rule applies you can only collect um uh email addresses if you're only if you're logged into a gmail account um if you are doing that you can also make sure to limit to one response that also requires that you have your the respondent is logged in with a gmail account and you can also choose if they want to edit after they submit the form so that they can go and change their information if if needed uh or you can leave a blank i think for the most case most people uh tend to leave this blank you don't want people to edit their information after they submit it but you may want them to see a summary of the charts and text responses that have come in so if it's something a bit more collaborative you may want them to be able to see the responses that have come in presentation this gives you a few different options and this is where you can uh show a link to submit another response uh and this is where you can show the confirmation message so this is this will just play on the screen after they've submitted the form so if you wanted to uh give them more information for what they uh for anything related to the form or who they can contact if they have questions or where to follow up or direct them to your website you can put all that information here in the confirmation message and also with the uh you can show the progress bar uh which is up there the first check box so that will display how much how many more pages or questions they have to complete in order to submit the form and that's optional or you can shuffle the question order which uh is useful if you're doing something like surveys and you don't want people to be biased based on uh the way they're filling out their responses um so keep in mind when you use that though if you've structured your form to kind of have the easier questions at the beginning like I recommended uh then you may not want to shuffle them but it is useful if you're doing something like a quiz which we'll get to here um so if you want to turn your form into a quiz and this is probably used more in the education uh section or maybe you're using it as a quiz to evaluate you know if your volunteers understood a training session for example uh you could create it as a quiz so you can then assign um if you mark this as a quiz and you go back to your form the questions will have additional fields to them so on the back end when you're designing your form they'll have additional uh settings where you can kind of where you can define what the grades are for each question what the value values are so that it will be able to score it for you uh quizzes are a little bit more detailed so I'm not going to go into it too much as we have eight minutes left this would be the answer key or an example for the answer key so if uh you go if you have set it up as a quiz and you go to responses you'll see uh you'll see it a little differently so you'll be able to see what everyone's average uh score was and the medium and the range as well whoops sorry um so I was going to try to do a demo but I don't think I have enough time so I'm going to wrap this up and see if I have any questions and if there's something you want me to show I can uh definitely open it up and show you uh one thing I wanted to mention is uh the power of using something like google forms is really what you can do with it after the fact it's great that you it's a great and easy way to collect data and information at the outset for whatever you need but being able to take that information and use it somewhere else is really what makes it powerful so Zapier is a automation tool that can really expand uh your use of google forms so depending what information you're collecting or where you need it to go uh these are just some of the examples uh that Zapier's put together that are kind of uh default zaps uh that you can use to automate um so for example if somebody submits a uh google form you can create a Trello card if you use Trello or a Santa if you use a Santa uh you can put responses into a Slack channel if you use Slack you can update your mail chimp subscribers you can send an email so by default google forms doesn't send an automated email response it just displays that message on the screen that I showed you but if you wanted an email to go to that respondent automatically you can set up uh Zapier and have it send an email through your gmail account um for any form submissions and you can take information that they submitted in the form and include it in the email as well so if you wanted to send their responses back to them to validate what they've done um or you can even use it as a two or three steps app if you wanted to take their submission you know do some calculations on it or or do something to it and then send it back um there's options for that as well you can even create google calendar events so if they're you know maybe submitting a request for a meeting date or an interview date or something um or a due date maybe uh you can use that as well um and again I mentioned a Santa so those are some great uh tips um last thing is resources so if you do need any help with google forms uh the one funny thing with google forms is the help button is in the very very bottom right corner um whereas I think most of the other google apps it's a little more prominent up at the top uh but if you need google help within google forms it's down there at the bottom I also offer one-on-one training and consulting if you do need to uh get a bit deeper or you need any help setting up forms or doing any automations you can reach out to me as well I'm happy to help if I can and I mentioned earlier our next event is our virtual onboarding program using free tools uh and I think that's all I have and I've I've left four minutes for you guys to ask any questions if you have any or if you wanted to see anything specific I can pull up google forms and show you um you can either come off mute or drop me a message in the chat and I can uh try to help you hello Sandra um this is Boran from Orchestras Canada thank you so much for an amazing presentation really really useful my question is that I noticed that in our organization um we tend to use google forms for more like day-to-day surveys like we just had a conference and we just want to do a quick survey with with the people who attended right but for some reason like for more elaborate surveys we tend to use um survey monkey and I don't know why that is but I'm just asking you like is there an advantage of using survey monkey is it does it have more options like I'm I'm wondering I think it does have I think it does have a lot more options in analytics built in there um I haven't used survey monkey in a while because for most for the most part I can do most of what I need through um google forms uh I know the I think the power of google of survey monkey was um all the analytics like it is definitely more powerful and there's different ways to use it um I don't know specifically without knowing what their use cases are I'm not sure why they'd use that more than google forms okay yeah yeah I understand I mean just yeah with the um fact that the analytics are if they're more elaborate then that would make sense to use on a bigger survey yeah especially with bigger surveys I think um and I I think there might have been other options it it might have been able to get around that issue with uh file uploads uh and not needing to be a google a gmail user in order to do some of the respondents because sometimes it's limited that way so I think survey monkey is a little more flexible with that okay thank you no problem um Sarah is asking if I've used google forms for integration with sales force database I haven't specifically but um I'm pretty sure that Zapier is able to do that because I know they integrate with sales force I'd be surprised if they couldn't integrate the two together um so it it should be possible I haven't done it specifically though I'm not sure if that helps there's also if you're not um if that doesn't work there I'm sure you could also use air table and I'm not sure if you guys um we're at our last event with uh Matt Bourne who did a session on air table I'm sure there's a way you can use google forms and sales force within air table to kind of connect them and to connect that data uh that would possibly be another option as well any other questions yeah it's called air table if you look back on our events um on our uh on our chapter page on uh events dot techsoup dot org uh and look for the air table event that just happened uh I want to say two weeks ago uh you'll get more information about air table as well it was a great session for anybody um that that missed it excellent well we're at one o'clock so if you do have any other questions or feedback or anything you want to chat about you can reach me at Sandra at allaboutsystems.ca uh and or through the event page I think you can get me there as well so thank you everybody have a great rest of your day thank you thanks you too