People spend an average of 23 hours a week online with email, social media, and texting. ~ Business News Daily. That’s almost one entire day!

They also spend 2 hours and 8 minutes a day browsing the internet on a pc or smartphone. ~ Nielsen Report 

What are the chances your church office is open to answer questions, register people for events, or sign people up for small groups when all these people are online? Not likely.

So how can your church be there for people 24/7?

The answer is through forms on your website. These forms are always ready to help connect people to your church. They can also be used to free up staff from doing tedious manual entry.   

That’s why we’re excited to share the updated forms builder!

The new form builder uses a workbench structure and encompasses drag and drop functionality, allowing you to rapidly create new forms for any situation. This is just another way we’re improving Ekklesia 360 CMS to speed up your workflow so you can get more done.

Getting Started

To create a new form, go to the Connect tab and select Forms.

Take A Guided Tour

To help you get comfortable with the new form builder, we added a guided tour. Just hover over “quick tips” to get started. On the tour you’ll learn about the workbench, the preview section and the action menu. Also included are links to support documents, in case you want an in depth explanation of the form builder.

Exploring The Forms Workbench

One of the most useful enhancements is the workbench. Not only can you select form elements and drag them in place, certain elements have assigned structure and options. We spent extra time developing these elements:

• Name
• Phone
• Address
• Date

Let’s look at just a few of these new elements to understand how you can use them at your church.

Using The Date Element

You’ll notice when adding a Date Element it creates a drop down date selector month. Also you can set the start and end year.

This is great for children and student events where a child needs to be born between specific years. It can also be used in volunteer application forms, to ensure people are old enough to take on certain responsibilities.

Using The Phone Element

With the new phone element we included a place for the area code.  Ensuring you get all the information you need to make a call.

If you’ve ever used a form without preformatted elements, you’ve received incomplete submissions. For instance, you might have a multisite church with locations in 5 different area codes. How could you know which of the 5 area codes the phone number belongs to if it’s not captured in the form? Now you don’t have to worry about that, among other sorting limitations. Hooray!

Unleash The Power Of Group Element

Of all the new elements the one our team and people who tested the form were most excited about was the Group Element. Often times you’re creating forms that need need to have multiple groupings for the same information.

Below are a few forms where you might want to use Group Element:

• Sunday School Sign Up
• Small Group Sign Up
• Vacation Bible School
• Membership Classes
• Event Registration

Let’s look at just one example, imaging having to create a form for the childrens ministry that must allow a parent to register multiple children. It needs to include information like:

• Name
• Grade
• Birth Date
• Allergies or Special Needs

You can now add those form elements one time, place them in a group element, and then duplicate them. Allowing you to add an additional child to the form in a matter of seconds instead of having to add all the form elements for each additional child.

These are just a few highlights from the new forms builder. If you’re an Ekklesia 360 CMS ministry partner, log in and start playing with the new forms now.

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