On April 17, 2011, we experienced the first episode of Game of Thrones and for the last eight years we’ve consumed 73 episodes over the course of eight seasons. But now, our watch has ended.
Formstack is great for building productive workflows, automating data collection, and creating surveys, but we also have amazing Professional Services and Customer Support teams who can create really cool forms.
We have a lot of Game of Throne fans at Formstack. To celebrate the end of an era, two Stackers built a form to gather data about who our team members thought would make it through the final season of Game of Thrones. The form ended with two bonus questions: Who will kill the night king, and who will sit on the Iron Throne?
We had two goals with this form. After recently joining forces with Bedrock Data and WebMerge, we wanted to encourage conversation between new and old Stackers over mutual interests. With an incredibly active Game of Thrones Slack channel, we knew a GoT death pool would be a hit with employees and wanted to find a fun way to engage with our awesome client base.
Employee Engagement
“Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder." - Petyr Baelish
You may know that Formstack is a remote-first company. While we have offices in Indianapolis and Colorado Springs, about 60% of our 190 employees work remotely. Since culture is an important part of our success, we are always trying to find ways to connect our employees across time zones and countries.
A large part of that interaction happens over Slack. We use Slack every day to get updates on tasks, share files, and collaborate across teams. We also use Slack to chat by a sort of “remote watercooler.” We have Slack channels dedicated to everything from cars to music to help Stackers interact with employees outside of their own team.
Once we set up our Game of Thrones form, it was time to start the discussion in our Game of Thrones Slack channel. The discussions were fierce on who would live, who would die, and who would ultimately rule the Seven Kingdoms.
Read More: Remote Team Communications
Customer Engagement
“When you play the game of thrones, you win or your die." - Cersei Lannister
We anticipated that if our staff enjoyed this form, our customers would too. So, we turned our form into a contest. Each correct alive or dead prediction was worth one point, and the bonus questions were three each.
The top five submissions with the most correct responses won an amazing prize pack. We took to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to share our Game of Thrones form. Throughout the season, we used tweets and instagram polls to engage with our customers about the show.
Formstack Features
"No one can survive in this world without help. No one." - Jorah Mormont
We knew there was potential for this form to gather a lot of data, and we wanted to be prepared. We used a few of our favorite Formstack features to keep our form fun and make data collection a breeze.
For this form, our Google Sheets integration was really useful. We’ve got a few tips and tricks to help you make the most of it.
Analytics
"Are you a sheep? No, you're a dragon. Be a dragon." - Olenna Tyrell
Google Sheets is a great way to do some basic analysis on your data. We knew we’d want to share some stats throughout the season with data from our form. We used the SUM and other basic math functions to create graphs depicting what respondents thought would happen to our favorite characters. We took to our social media to share those results.
Tracking Results
"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone. That's why I read so much." - Tyrion Lannister
We had a lot of submissions with data for a lot of characters. We didn’t want to manually update scores for hundreds of people each week, so we used an IF formula to aggregate scores. Our formula started off like this and repeated for each cell where we had data about a character.
Pro Tip: If you plan to copy your formula across many cells, as we did, make sure to add $ in front of the column letter and row number of cells you want to repeatedly pull data from.
With this data, we were able to build our final leaderboard.
Learn More: If you’re interested in learning more about sending your form data to Google Sheets, check out this step-by-step tutorial.
Other Applications
"There is only one thing we say to death: Not today." - Syrio Forel
This isn’t the first time we’ve used Formstack forms to encourage discussion across Formstack teams. We use forms for everything from collecting customer stories to predicting the next Best Picture winner.
There really is no limit to the forms you can create using Formstack.
If you’re interested in trying it yourself, you can get started today with a 14-day free trial.
