Occasionally, I cannot resist sharing a Google jewel that I’ve discovered.  This is a small one, but it’s so darn useful that I cannot resist:  Google forms.

If you work in a nonprofit (or even if you don’t), you’re constantly bringing different groups of people together for different reasons, and there are lots of complicated and expensive tools out there for managing big events.  But it seems like keeping track of which 15 people will come to a roundtable discussion you’re holding requires lots of emails back and forth, which has always struck me as terribly inefficient in this day and age.

Once again, enter Google.  Already, with Google docs, they’ve created an online way to share documents, spreadsheets, etc. in a way that meets 90% of the collaboration needs you’ll have in the workplace – without Windows Vista and a Microsoft Exchange server.

And with Google forms, you can easily (I mean in less than 60 seconds, and it’s free) create an online RSVP that pops right into a shareable spreadsheet.  If you want to see one I made in less than a minute as a demo, click here.  And here are the instructions for how to create your own.

(And yes, I know that Evite and Pingg and the like exist, but I don’t want to ship someone off to a third party website which has ads and who-knows-what content.  I just want to know if they’re coming to the breakfast we’re hosting).

I know that in the grand scheme of things this is very very small, but it’s also very useful.  And since I’m thankful to the person who inadvertently showed it to me, I thought I’d pass it along.