Organizing Events / Tech Help for Bloggers Series

Looking for the party? : ) Hop over here for the giveaway.
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Welcome to another installment of the Tech Help for Bloggers Series. This series is focused on providing technical tips and advice to help you understand and get the most out of your blogging experience. Here is the schedule of posts:

• July 1       Getting Started / Intro to HTML
• July 4       Sprucing Up Your Site Part 1 / Blog and social media buttons
• July 8       Sprucing Up Your Site Part 2 / Creating pages and navigation bars
• July 15     Getting to Know the Settings in Blogger / Your blog, behind the scenes
• July 22     Layouts and Templates in Blogger / How to change your blog's look
• July 26     CSS and Web Fonts / How to use custom fonts for your blog
• July 29     Organizing Events / Creating forms, polls, and sharable documents
• Aug 1       Hosting A Linky Party / Guest Post w/ Laura of TGIFF! and Quokka Quilts
• Aug 5       Pinterest and Flickr / Features for managing image sharing
• Aug 12     Giveaways / Technical tips and tricks for hosting a successful giveaway

Today we are looking more closely at tools to help organize a blog event.

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When you decide to host an event on your blog--such a series, quilt along, quilting bee, or a swap--the most challenging aspect of getting that event going can often be organizing everyone participating into one united front. I've found through my experience hosting events that having a master list of important information can be my saving grace; be that sign-up info, a document that everyone has access to, or even poll information. As someone who keeps elaborate to-do lists in real life (I bet some of you do too!) having all of that important info together and in one place helps me to rest easy. So here are a few tech tips that I have about getting started on organizing a blog event.

Google Documents

Google docs is a good place to start, especially if you already have a Google account through either e-mail or through your blog. You do need to have a Google account to log-in to use this tool, but since it can save event information that may or may not be private (such as a list of people's names and e-mail addresses), having that extra layer of protection is a good thing, as Ms. Martha would say. ; )

If you already have g-mail, you can access google documents from the bar at the top of the page where it says "Documents". Once you have logged in you will reach a screen that looks like the one below. Even if you have never used google docs, you might still have a few files in your list and may be wondering "how the heck did these get there?". Well, with google docs you can share files very easily, and many creative bloggers use this tool to help them to distribute patterns to folks. If you have downloaded any of these types of files, google keeps them all for you here so that even if you lose them on your computer, you'll still have them online. Nice!

From the menu on the left-hand side labeled "Create" you can select a number of different types of files to make (all for free too!):

• Documents- word processor program
• Presentations- similar to Microsoft Powerpoint
• Spreadsheets- similar to Microsoft Excel
• Forms- to create interactive polls and questionnaires
• Drawings- similar to Microsoft Paint
• Table- in the Beta stages (you can test it out), for data collection
• Script- Code writing program 
• Collection- A collection of any of these types of files

For this tutorial, let's select forms, which will take you to the page below:

I love this tool actually. : ) Here you can create interactive forms and polls that are perfect for sign-ups, like what I used for the Mystery Charm Swaps, and quick opinion polls to gauge how your readers or potential event participants feel about a certain thing, which are perfect for the planning stages of an event. In order to get started, first select the type of question you would like to ask. Let's select "Multiple Choice".

  

With Multiple Choice you then add in each of the possible answers one at a time. You can also choose to make the question required or not depending on what you need. Click "Done" once you are finished to save. You can then add other questions to round out your form, or you can click the preview link and the very bottom of the page to preview what the form will look like. Without applying a theme, your form will look very straightforward:

You can then click "Embed" from the "More Actions" menu to get the correct code to add your form to your blog if you are satisfied with how it looks, or you can apply a theme to jazz it up a bit. Totally your call! Google provides a number of themes to choose from:

I selected the "Red Poppies" theme below:

Once your form looks exactly how you always dreamed it would : ), clicked embed to get the code and save your changes. When you open your form again from your Google Docs menu it will be transformed magically into a spreadsheet like in the image below:

This spreadsheet will capture all of the responses to your poll and catalogue them based on the time they were entered, making it easy to see who entered their responses first (important to know for a limited space sign-up, such as a swap). You can select Form from the menu above to make changes directly to your form either in its content or its appearance if you need to later on. 

Finally if you want to share the information collected from your form with another person or group of people (if perhaps you are hosting a joint-blog event), you can click the "Share" button to give other people access to the file. Add their names to the access list and simply copy the link provided, slap it in an e-mail, and send it off to those you are including. Very simple!

So take some time if you like to peruse Google Docs. Today I showed just one way to use this tool to help with blog event planning and execution, but there are a bunch of other ways this site can help you to make your blog more interactive.

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This Wednesday, Laura from TGIFF! and Quokka Quilts will be guest posting on the TGIFF blog about hosting Linky parties. This will be a fantastic way to learn more about hosting this type of fun and highly interactive event from someone with a lot of great experience. You might even want to host TGIFF yourself! Laura will show you how. : )