Improved sign-up forms for meet-ups

Google Maps tips & tricks
1

Hi Meetup-organizers,

@NareshDarji recently presented a Google From designed to help Meet-up organizers collect data and sign-ups from participants. I have improved his form and I am happy to now share this work with you.

Screenshot of how the form looks like for organizers. It looks very different when edited and ready for participants to sign up.
Screenshot of how the form looks like for organizers. It looks very different when edited and ready for participants to sign up.1102×644 112 KB

You will find Naresh’s post here: An easy way to submit your meetup.

Based on his work and the inspirational work of @KarenVChin and @ErmesT for the meetup called Create Local Guides Virtual Meet-up Invite the form was improved to make it even easier for Meet-up organizers with respect to the following:

  1. There are now two forms one for virtual meet-ups and one for physical meet-ups.
  2. Privacy
  3. Photo permission
  4. Permission to save emails for future invites
  5. A confirmation message to those who sign up

Especially the slides from Karen and Ermes were super helpful.

I know there is still room for improvement, so I invite you to try out the forms and provide feedback as comments below. I will then update the forms.

The following links are designed to let you save a copy to your Google Drive:

http://bit.ly/MF-p Physical meet-up

http://bit.ly/MF-v Virtual meet-up

When opening the links you should see something like this. If you Make a copy you will be able to edit and customize the form to your event.
When opening the links you should see something like this. If you Make a copy you will be able to edit and customize the form to your event.890×432 29.1 KB

While I hope to make new and improved versions, I expect the short links above to remain the same. Feel free to bookmark them for future use. I would really appreciate your test and input. Don’t hold back on your critique and I’m happy to correct any spelling mistakes etc.

Cheers

Morten

2

Thanks for taking time to elaborate your proposal for the RSVP module, @MortenCopenhagen , I am happy that you found helpful the content produced by @KarenVChin and myself.

Sorry for not being able to respond to your PM yesterday. In any case, here we are, and all of us will learn by a public discussion.

A few notes:

  • Your City followed by State/Country - We like to collect statistics that are representing the audience in a virtual meet-up, and to share the statistics in form of Graphic charts. To create a chart you need a single type of data in your questions, otherwise creating a chart will be extremely difficult. My suggestion, as we are talking about a virtual meet-up, is to use only “country”. Asking question is one of the useful function that you can use with a Google Form
  • Photo permission: We will need to update that part. During the meetup we had to ask one of the attendees to turn off the camera, as we couldn’t guarantee (no one could) that no one would take screenshots or photos. So in our last meetup we changed the policy, using the one used by Google for the events as a reference (making everyone aware that photos or screenshots could be taken and published). This is in line with the rules and with GDPR

I personally think that the Google Form itself should not be used alone in a meet-up submission, because in this way you are missing all the public interaction with the Local Guides in the community, as I tried to explain to @NareshDarji . My personal suggestion is tom write a post in Connect for the meet-up, and add in there the RSVP form. The answer “we can more connect with the recipients in other ways” is not possible, if you don’t know already the people, excluding the ones you don’t know. Otherwise it means that you are using the email also in another way, and this should be not permitted, and is quite inappropriate as we have already a community where we can interact: Connect

3

@ErmesT

Thanks so much for the very constructive feedback.

I will change the forms so virtual will be Country only and in the physical form, it will be City only. I already did. I will later try to find a list of countries to add as a selection list.

Regarding the photo permission for the virtual form, I will be happy to adjust. Could you help me find the text needed for this update? Would you recommend keeping it for the physical meetup?

I agree that communication via comments under a Connect post or even using WhatsApp or Telegram is much needed. And you described this very well in your pdf-slides. But it was difficult to decide what to include when I also wanted to make a short and to the point post. I added the following sentence in the forms to inspire/remind organizers about this:

  1. Please also remember to create a separate post on Connect to announce your meet-up and facilitate communication.

Cheers

Morten

4

I think you didn’t read my post exactly @ErmesT .

Here it is clearly written that first write a post in Connect for the meet-up, and add in there the RSVP form in the post.

The form in my post is just a sample in which email address is not mandatory. Each host can make the necessary modifications to the form as per their meetup and requirements before sharing his/her post.

5

Thanks, @MortenCopenhagen for taking the time to update the meetup form. It’s fine from my side,else you can add other improvements as suggested by @ErmesT

6

Oops, you are right @NareshDarji , I missed that part.

Maybe you missed it too, as I was tricked by your reply, as indicated on my previous answer here in this thread.

Let me edit my post in there

7

Thanks, @NareshDarji

And thanks for starting this work.

Cheers

Morten

8

Thanks again to @ErmesT .

The forms have now been updated to include:

  • A dropdown list of countries
  • The improved photo/screenshot consent question
  • Instructions to organizers about also creating a Connect post for improved communication.

Cheers

Morten