This post is a guest article from our partner Idealist Consulting.
Think back to the first day of your job. Not only did you have a lot of paperwork from HR to fill out, you also had a bunch of new names to memorize, new business processes to grasp, and new technology to learn. How hard was it to get acquainted with your new tech setup? Did it make your head spin or did the onboarding process allow you to slowly adjust?
At Idealist Consulting, we’re firm believers in practicing technology adoption techniques to help keep new users from getting overwhelmed. And forms are a great way to help with new user adoption.
Let’s jump into some of our favorite ways to you can help new users adopt technology and speed up their onboarding with web forms.
Finish Paperwork Faster
What’s one huge benefit of using web forms for common onboarding paperwork? They’re way faster than relying on paper forms. On average, an adult can type almost four times faster than they can write. With this in mind, using web based forms for onboarding processes can help save time when a new employee has a stack of paperwork to fill out.
You can turn long, tedious paper forms into quick work for new employees by using multiple pages to break up the information and prefilling to reduce the need to enter the same information over and over.
Help Hesitant New Users
A great way to help a new user who may have a lot of data entry responsibilities is to start them off with limited access to the technology. By using web based forms you can simplify the process, allowing them to just focus on the data entry and slowly become accustomed to their new tech solution. An example of how this could work is to use forms with just the necessary fields when a new administrative professional is adding a new account into your CRM, such as entering a new donor or member.
Bonus Nonprofit Tip: Use simplified internal forms to help new or struggling users remember key pieces of information to ask when they are speaking to a donor or member. Forms can both provide talking points and questions for employees to use with donors and allow your employees to capture their responses as well.
Increase Productivity
Forms offer the incredibly helpful aspect of automating your processes. Even with just the use of a picklist or required fields, you can save yourself time and create business processes with forms that will help you focus on larger issues. FormAssembly offers a host of templates and an easy-to-use online builder so you can quickly create a wide variety of forms for internal and external processes.
Overall, forms can help struggling users become less overwhelmed. Making tedious processes into easy-to-manage forms will increase user adoption of your technology and business processes and allow the users to focus on important work instead of repetitive data entry.
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Interested in learning more about using forms in your nonprofit organization?
Download this joint FormAssembly-Idealist Consulting whitepaper.
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