There’s a big divide when it comes to the holidays — some people love them. Others? Not so much.
We get it — the holidays can be stressful. There are high expectations for friends and family, pressure to have fun, the list goes on. But the stress can rise to a whole new level, especially when your office appoints you as the official holiday party planner.
Whether a dinner with the team or big partner event, holiday party planners have to take care of any and all of an office’s party needs.
Being appointed the holiday party planner isn’t a bad thing per se — it means your colleagues think that you have good taste and trust your judgement on what a good time entails. (Or it means you’re the biggest sucker on the team).
But being the office holiday party planner isn’t all that bad; you just need to have the right tools in place.
That’s where online forms come into play.
With one online form, you can gather availability, plus-one information, food allergies, diet restrictions, which holidays are celebrated (or aren’t), and more. Better yet, when you use Jotform, each form response is emailed to you and stored in your account, so it’s easy to keep track of all the data you collect.
Check out a few ways online forms will make you love hosting the holidays and help you plan an event for the books.
Templates + Themes
The holiday season is busy, so it’s important to be conscious of how you manage your time. When you use premade templates and themes, all the work has already been done for you. You just need to update the placeholder text with your own, and you’ll be ready to go. Jotform has 10,000+ templates to choose from — including templates for event registration, payment collection, and more. There’s also a themes store chock-full of free holiday themes for your forms, so you can easily include a festive background for your event.
Customization
If premade templates and themes aren’t your thing, you also have the option to build a form from scratch. With Jotform, you can choose between two form formats – Classic and Cards. Once you choose the type of format you like, let the customization begin! You can personalize your forms to include a company logo, brand fonts, and a custom image or video for the background (playing a clip of A Christmas Story might win you some brownie points — just saying). We put together a specialty form for our San Francisco office holiday party.
Conditional logic
Conditional logic is a nice to have when you’re asking questions with multiple parts because it shows or hides selected form fields based on a user’s preference. For instance, if you ask the question, “Will you bring a plus-one?” some people will say yes, then see a follow-up question, which might ask for their plus-one’s full name and email.
But some people will say no, and this “no” could be painful (especially if they just got dumped). So any “nos” will skip right to the next question without being prodded with anymore of that plus-one hullabaloo.
Image upload
Whether it be through a file upload field or a widget, there are a few different ways users can collect images in their forms. People always ask if we have this feature, and the answer is YES. Image upload is great for many reasons, but our favorite use case is for sending in pictures for contests.
For example, image uploads are perfect for “cutest holiday pet outfit” or “ugly holiday sweater” contests. You can ask your form respondents to upload an image of whatever the contest is about, collect the assets, then easily download or print them to share at your holiday party and vote on. (You can also use a form for this!)
Payments
Some office holiday parties require everyone to chip in, so costs can be divided among the team. Prior to online forms, holiday party planners had to collect this money via cash or check and keep track of who paid for what, who needed change, etc.
But with online forms, collecting payments is a breeze. You can integrate your forms with any of the 30+ payment processing integrations Jotform has and choose which one works best for your needs. Payments go directly into your account with zero hassle.
Data organization
After you collect all of your data, you’ll need a way to organize it so it’s easy to access, analyze, and distribute. A great way to handle data organization is to sync with one of Jotform’s integrations, such as Google Sheets, Asana, or Trello. Google Sheets works wonders if you’re looking for a simple solution where your data will be automatically funneled into a spreadsheet. Asana and Trello are amazing if you want to send your data directly into an app that’ll track your work, assign deadlines, and more.
So there you have it, holiday party planners! Online forms will surely make you love hosting the holidays. Let us know in the comments how online forms helped you plan office festivities this holiday season.
Photo by freestocks.org from Pexels
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