Google Forms – Automating the Workflow

A hidden feature that many people don’t know about with Google Forms is the ability to create scripts that do actions with the forms upon a pre-determined trigger. TJ Houston, Technology Director at Huron City Schools wrote a blog post over a year ago that I use on a regular basis for use both at work and home. He detailed how Huron used Google Forms to create a self creating bus report incident form. You can read more about it here: Google Forms and PDF

At work we were hosting three free workshops surrounding Ohio’s Sunshine Law and needed a way to register people so that we knew who was coming. We could have used our event software but it would have been overkill for what we needed and wouldn’t have been a good use of our resources as we have other items that need attention. I used TJ’s blog post to create a workflow to take care of this need.

We are using a Google Form which will register people. As they register they will receive an e-mail with a PDF confirmation of their registration. We have a way to track attendance and can follow up with people after the event. An additional problem we have is gaining feedback from our attendees on our events. The blog post came to the rescue once again!

In order to solicit feedback, attendees will be given a link at the end of the session and asked for their feedback. Once they provide feedback and submit the form they will receive a certificate of attendance via e-mail. All of this took us about an hour to configure on the back end and test. The end result being a registration form that automatically provides attendees with a copy of their registration and a certificate of attendance all without intervention from a user.

We are working on creating a script that will send out e-mail reminders to people the day before their session and a few other items.

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