Forms is how you ask people something and get the answers back in one place. Build a form in a few minutes, hand out one permanent link that opens on any phone with no login and no app, and watch the responses collect where your whole team can read them. It also reports on itself, so the weekly numbers arrive by email instead of being assembled by hand.
What it is
Most organizations collect information in ways that do not add up. A sign-up sheet on a clipboard, a reply-all email thread, a spreadsheet somebody keeps on their own computer, a paid survey tool nobody remembers the password to. The answers exist, but they are scattered, and nobody can say what the totals are without an afternoon of retyping.
Forms replaces that with one place to ask and one place to read. Every form you build gets a permanent public link. Anyone with the link can answer it from a phone without signing in or installing anything. The answers land in your organization's account, where your team can read them, export them, and have them summarized automatically.
There is no per-form cost and no cap on how many you build. A daily activity log, a volunteer sign-up, an intake form, a post-event survey, and a membership signup can all run at once.
Where to find it
Open My Apps and choose Forms, in the Compliance, HR and Technology group. The app itself lives at www.allinonenonprofit.com/forms/.
The forms you build are served from a separate public address, www.allinonenonprofit.com/form/, with a token that identifies which form to show. That split is deliberate: the app is yours and requires a sign-in, and the form is public and requires nothing.
Two kinds of form
When you create a form you pick one of two kinds, and the choice decides what the app does with a submission.
- A general form or survey. You write the questions, the answers collect in the Responses screen, and you decide whether they also create a record somewhere. Use this for activity logs, intake, surveys, applications, and feedback.
- A membership signup. This is the public "Join us" front door. It adds whoever completes it to your existing Membership roster, and it can collect dues at the same time. Use this when the point of the form is to enroll somebody.
You can change most things about a form later, so if you are unsure, start with a general form.
Building the form
A form is a title, a short description, and a list of questions. Add a question with Add field, type the question in the label box, and pick its type. Every question can be marked Required, and the arrows on each field move it up or down, so you can rearrange the order after the fact.
There are eleven field types:
| Type | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Short text | A name, a room number, anything that fits on one line |
| Long text | An explanation, a comment, anything that might run to a paragraph |
| An email address, checked for the right shape before it submits | |
| Phone | A phone number |
| Number | Anything you will add up later, like pounds collected or meals served |
| Dropdown | One answer from a list, when the list is long |
| Multiple choice | One answer from a list, when you want all the options visible |
| Checkboxes | Any number of answers from a list |
| Date | A date, with the phone's own date picker |
| File upload | A photo, a signed form, a certificate |
| Consent checkbox | A single box somebody ticks to agree to something |
Dropdown, Multiple choice, and Checkboxes each take a list of options, one per line. Short text, Long text, Email, Phone, and Number can carry a placeholder, which is the faint example text inside the empty box.
Showing a question only when it applies
Any question can be set to appear only when an earlier answer matches a particular value. Pick the earlier question and the answer that should reveal this one.
This keeps a form short for most people while still capturing detail from the few it applies to. Ask "Did anything go wrong on the route today?" and only show the box asking what happened when the answer is yes. Somebody with a normal day answers one question instead of two.
Membership levels and payment
A membership signup can offer as many levels as you need, and each level is priced one of three ways. You can mix all three on one form.
- Free. The person joins instantly on submit.
- Fixed price. You set the amount.
- Pay what you want. The person chooses the amount.
Paid levels collect dues at submit through your own connected Stripe account, so the money goes to your organization directly. Somebody is recorded as paid only after the checkout actually completes, which means an abandoned payment does not leave a member who looks paid but is not.
Where the answers go
Every response lands in the Responses screen. Beyond that, a form can also file the person in the app that should hold them, so a submission becomes a record instead of a row somebody has to copy by hand. A form can route into your Contacts, your Volunteers, or your Members.
When you turn routing on, you tell the form which of your questions holds the name, which holds the email, and which holds the phone. A membership signup always routes to Members.
Routing is optional. A daily pounds log does not need to create a contact record, and turning routing off keeps your Contacts list clean.
Sharing the form
Open a form and choose Share. Everything you need to get it in front of people is on that one panel.
- The public link. One permanent address you can hand out by email, text, or print. It does not expire, so it can go on a flyer.
- A website button. A snippet you paste into your own site to put a button on any page.
- A QR code. Download it and put it on a poster, a table tent, or a name badge. Somebody points a phone at it and the form opens.
- An invitation blurb. Ready-written wording to paste into an email or a social post.
- Hand it to your newsletter. Send the form straight to the Membership Newsletter or a Marketing email campaign in one click.
The public form carries your organization's own name and branding, not ours, so somebody opening it recognizes who is asking.
Answers survive being interrupted
A long form used to be risky on a phone. Somebody would get most of the way through, take a call, come back, and find an empty form.
Answers now save themselves on the person's own device as they type. If they close the page by accident, or their phone rings, or the battery dies, their answers are still there when they return to the link. The draft is cleared once they submit, so the next person to use that phone starts fresh and nobody sees a stranger's half-finished answers.
This happens on its own. There is nothing to switch on and nothing for the person filling it in to do.
Reading the responses
Open a form and choose Responses to see everything that has come in, newest first, in a table you can scan. File upload answers are stored securely and can be downloaded from here.
The screen shows the most recent 500 responses at a time with a Load more control, and it tells you how many there are in total, so a busy form stays fast. The CSV download always contains every response, not just the page you are looking at, so a spreadsheet export is never quietly truncated.
You can link straight to one form's responses. The address takes the form https://www.allinonenonprofit.com/forms/?responses= followed by the form's token, which is useful for a bookmark or for pointing a colleague at the right screen.
You can also get an email on every submission. Set a notification address on the form and each answer arrives in full, so somebody who never opens the app still sees what came in.
Scheduled summary reports
This is the part that saves the most time, and it is the part most people do not know is there.
Any form can email your team a plain-language summary of its own responses, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually, to whatever list of addresses you choose. The summary is not a data dump. It contains the key figures, a breakdown for each question, and field notes pulled from the open comment answers, written the way a person would write them.
For a food rescue logging pounds every day, that means the monthly total, the split by site, and the recurring comments arrive on the first of the month without anybody assembling them. For a survey, it means you see the shape of the answers as they come in rather than at the end.
Turn it on from the form's Scheduled summary reports section, pick the cadence, and enter the recipients.
The board report
The same summary can become a document you would be comfortable handing to a board.
One click turns it into a Word document on your organization's own letterhead, which you can download, save to your Document Library, print, or email as an attachment. It is the reporting step most organizations do by hand the night before a meeting.
Spam control
A public form on the open internet will eventually be found by bots. Forms filters them with a hidden field that a person never sees and a check on how fast the form was completed. Both run automatically.
There is no captcha to configure and nothing for a real person to solve, which matters because a captcha is exactly the kind of friction that stops a volunteer submitting a log from their phone in a parking lot.
Your first form
- Open Forms from My Apps and choose New form.
- Give it a title people will recognize, and a one-line description saying what you are asking and why.
- Add your questions. Keep it short, and use a Number field for anything you will want to add up.
- Mark only the questions you truly need as Required. Every required question costs you some submissions.
- Save, then open Share and send the public link to one person you trust. Ask them to fill it in on a phone.
- Look at their answer in Responses, and fix anything that read badly on the small screen.
- Once it is right, hand out the link, and set up a scheduled summary so the numbers come to you.
Access and privacy
Forms is scoped to your organization. Your team sees the forms and the responses; the public sees only the form itself, at its own address, with no way back into your account.
A public form is exactly that, so think about what you are asking for. Collect what you need to do your work, say on the form what you will use it for, and be careful about asking for sensitive personal information on a link that anybody can open. If a form collects something confidential, keep the notification list short and review who on your team has access.
Looking for help beyond the platform?
See our Helpful Resources page for vetted external resources on legal and tax filing, funder research, governance training, insurance, technology discounts, and more.