Some readers here may know that I've started writing over at the Web 2.0 review site TechCrunch. One new service that I wrote about this week stood out as something that could be very useful for nonprofits. It's called Wufoo and it's an easy way to make online forms that can be inserted into your web page or used as separate pages. It is very flexible and honestly takes very little technical knowledge.
I'm sure that many organizations can imagine uses for easy to build online forms. This system makes it very easy to build any kind of form you can imagine. The finished product sits in an iFrame, a little box on your web page that users can interact with without having to reload the whole page. The look and feel can be highly customized to fit in nicely with the rest of your site. A web page interface lets you set all up all the fields in form and then provides a code snippet to copy and paste into your site.

Responses to your forms can be delivered by either email or RSS and the data can be displayed online (public or private). That data is also easy to export to an excel or CSV file on your desktop.

There is a free level of the service, but if you really want to make use of a Wufoo form on a high traffic site you'll want to get one of the premium levels of service.

Like most online "software as a service" that's coming out these days, Wufoo is relatively affordable and is easy for the company to update quickly and often without any trouble on the users' part.

If you work on a web site that you'd like to make more interactive and functional without a lot of programming knowledge or time invested, creating forms in Wufoo is one more way you can easily do that.

If you're interested in learning more, here's my review of Wufoo on TechCrunch. That write up includes more information about the company and a discussion with readers following the post.