Creating a paperless office or organization is easy in Engage - take all your forms online using the Form builder! The Forms tool can be used for a variety of purposes and the easy-to-use tools in Engage make it easy to move many of your current paper-based processes into your site. Utilize the links below to jump to a specific topic on the Forms tool.
- Accessing the form builder
- Basic properties
- Building Form Questions
- Adding Question Logic
- Adding Reviewers
- Publishing your form
Accessing the Form Builder
In an organization or administrative branch
If you are looking to build a form for your organization or branch, switch to the Manage view and select your organization. Open the organization drawer and select Forms. Then, click +Create Form.
As a community administrator
As a community administrator, you also have the ability to create forms on the administrative side of your site. Administrative forms can be useful when you need to create a form with different access permissions. Admin forms are a bit more robust than organization forms and give you additional review and sharing options. To build an administrative form, access the Admin view of your site and click the Configure dropdown. Then, click Forms and +Create Form.
When creating a form, you will first be prompted to identify your form properties. Enter a name for your form and then fill out the additional settings. See below for an explanation of each setting.
| Setting | Function |
| Active | Determine if the form should be accessible yet. If the active option is not chosen, then users will not be able to complete the form. Leaving "Active" unchecked allows you to work on a form before making it live to your users. |
| Start/end time | The time period for which the form should be open. Submissions will only be accepted during this time period. |
| Feature in Explore Forms | Enabling this option will make this form appear as “Featured” in the Forms Directory in Explore, allowing users to more easily find and fill out this form. This option only appears to community-wide administrators who oversee forms. |
| Hide from Explore Forms | Enabling this option will hide the form from the Explore view of Engage, including the Forms Directory and the organization page that created the form. This option can be used to hide organization registration related forms from public view, or to make forms private to send via message relay to a subset of users. This option only appears to community-wide administrators who oversee forms. |
| Submission Approval Process | Choose whether you would like the form's submissions to go through an approval/denial process where they are pending until processed, or if you prefer the for's submissions to be automatically marked as "received" without any approval process. |
| Allow Submissions from Public Users | Enabling this option means anyone, including those who do not have an account in your community, is able to fill out the form. If you enable this setting, “allow multiple submissions” will be disabled because there is no method to limit respondents to one submission. |
| Collect Personal Information | If allowing form submissions from public users, you can choose to add an additional screen to the submission process which will collect the name and email address of any user who completes the form without being signed in. |
| Allow Multiple Submissions | Users can submit more than one submission. If this option is not selected, users will be restricted from the form after one submission. |
| Submission Restrictions | Determine if you want to restrict the form to certain users. If you’re creating this form at the administrative level, you have the option to restrict the form to primary contacts in specific organization types. If you create this form in an organization, you can restrict the form to users within your organization that hold a specific position. If you want to make your form available to any user in your community, do not select any submission restrictions. |
After you determine the settings for your form, you’ll be taken to the form builder and you will land on the first page of your form. At any time, you can jump back into the settings by clicking Form Properties. In addition, you can jump to additional pages of the form by clicking Page List. To name the page, click Page Properties. The name of each page will be visible to users filling out the form.
When you’re ready to start adding questions into the form, take a look at the list of question types that are available to you. Each of these question types serve a unique purpose. See below for a complete explanation of each. Note that any time you add a question to your form or change a setting, these changes will save in real time.
| Question Type | Function |
| Check Box List | Multiple choice question that allows users to choose more than one option. |
| Radio Button List | Multiple choice question that only allows users to select one option. |
| Text Field | Open text response. Alter the number of rows to provide the user a larger space to write in for longer answers. You can also use the Text Field question to utilize validation, ensuring a specific format is entered. |
| Drop Down List | Multiple choice question where users can only choose one option. The only difference between the dropdown and radio button options is that the user has to click the dropdown to view the available choices. |
| Instructions | This is your method of providing additional instructions or information to the user. Instructions do not require any action on the part of the user. |
| Single Check Box | Think of this as a method to provide the user a set of terms and conditions that they need to agree to before they can proceed on the form. You can input the terms that need to be agreed upon and the user will be provided a single check box to confirm their agreement. |
| Ranking | Provide the user multiple answer choices for them to rank. You can also determine the maximum number of items they need to rank. |
| File Upload | Allow the user to upload a file from their computer. Files must be under 4 MB and the uploader accepts most file types. If you prefer a specific file type, make sure to indicate this within the instructions of the question. |
For each of the question types, you also have additional question options. Once you have created a question, click on the blue Edit icon within the question to view its additional options.
Potential options and their descriptions are below.
| Question Setting | Function |
| Required | Select the "Required" box if you want the question to be mandatory for users before proceeding. This option is available for all question types. |
| Shuffle Answers | For Check Box List and Radio Button List question types, you can choose to shuffle your answers. For example, if you input an alphabetical list but want the answer choices to appear random, you can shuffle them. Note: This will not shuffle the answers every time a different user fills out the form. |
| Minimum and maximum answers | If you are utilizing the Check Box List, you can identify the minimum or maximum number of answers a user can select. |
You also have the ability to put additional properties on your answer choices for Check Box List, Radio Buttons and Ranking question types.
| Question Setting | Function |
| Include Text Area | Text Area allows you to provide additional space for users to write-in an answer. For example, you may want to include an "Other" option to a multiple choice question, but want users to write-in their additional option. |
| Include Tooltip | The tooltip allows you to hover over the answer choice to read additional information about it. The additional information will appear automatically next to the answer choice. |
| Include Additional Text | Similar to the tooltip, Additional Text allows you to put in additional information about an answer choice. The difference between the two is in how the information appears. With Additional Text, an information icon appears next to the answer choice. Clicking that icon will open up a box with the additional information. |
Adding Question Logic
If your page includes multiple pages, you can add conditional logic to ensure the form is efficient for all users. The form builder utilizes page logic which means you can present the submitter a page of questions based on their answers to questions earlier in the form.
When you are done building your form, you can identify who needs to be have access to give feedback on form submissions. Depending on the type of form you created, options may vary. Read more about setting up form reviewers.
Publishing and Managing Submissions
When you're done building your form, navigate back to your form properties to publish it.
Now that you have the basics of Forms down, don't miss these tips and tricks on maximizing the tool.