One of the posters mentioned the reasonably priced Genius Sign PDF editor. Other posters mentioned Docusign.
I ruled out Genius Sign PDF immediately because it costs money. Whether we're talking about volunteers in an organization or employees, they expect their organization to provide whatever is needed to complete corporate forms and correspondence for free.
I had signed up for Docusign long ago as an experiment, so I logged in and tried it. I discovered it manipulates the document, that is, it adds a spot on the document for the signer to sign. That means it must have access to the contents of the document. I verified this by successfully sending a plain Word document, and then trying a password-protected Word document. The app got stuck when it couldn't convert the password-protected Word document. One of the reasons Civil Air Patrol can't use this is because we have cadets who are as young as 12, and forms may have their personally identifiable information. Sending it to a third-party platform without permission from national headquarters is a non-starter.
Another problem with Docusign is that they only give you about 4 free sends, then you have to start paying. Since volunteers and employees wouldn't go along with this, it's up to the leadership of the organization to pay for a corporate account, or choose a different option.
A final issue: kids. How many of you have notarized permission slips signed by parents so their kids could do various things. An organization wants to adopt an e-signing solution so, among other things, the parents can esign permission slips (ones that don't need notarization). The kids are members of the organization, but they can't get an account with an esigning vendor like Docusign because those organizations usually require account holders to be 18, or if the're liberal, 13. The parents can't sign up because they're not members of the organization. So we're still left with the issue of kids missing out on fun activities because they forgot to have their parents sign a piece of paper. |
