Strengthening the organization

Forms & Applications

Building a form, putting it on a public link, and working through what comes back without it turning into an inbox.

2 min readOpen it in the app →Included from Core

On this page

What you can build
Designing a form people finish
Working the responses

What you can build

A form is a set of fields you assemble, published at a public link that anybody can fill in without an account. Responses arrive in one place, move through a simple workflow, and export as a spreadsheet.

The Forms and Applications page listing forms with their status and response counts — The Forms & Applications workspace, where forms are built and their responses collected.

Type	For
Short text and long text	Names, and anything written.
Email and phone	Contact details, validated as you would expect.
Number	Amounts, counts, ages.
Date	Anything with a day attached.
Select, radio, checkbox	Fixed choices, one or several.

The field types available.

Designing a form people finish

Ask for the fewest fields that let you make the next decision. Everything else can be asked later, of the smaller group who get that far.
Put the hard questions last. Somebody who has answered eight easy questions will answer a hard one. Somebody facing it first will leave.
Say what happens next, on the form. "We respond within five working days" prevents most of the follow-up email a form generates.
Mark optional fields optional. People abandon forms over questions they cannot answer and do not realize they can skip.

Working the responses

Read new responses and move each one through the workflow rather than leaving it new.
Use the reviewer note to record why, not what.
What is already in the response. Why you decided as you did is the thing nobody can reconstruct later.
Convert the ones that become real into records in the tool that owns them.
A programs applicant becomes a person in People Served; a partnership inquiry becomes a constituent.
Export to a spreadsheet when somebody needs the raw set.