This is a hands-on tour. You will click through the live demo yourself, step by step, while this guide tells you exactly what to do. By the end you will have built a form, shared it, filled it in as a volunteer would on a phone, read the responses, and set the monthly numbers to email themselves to your board.
Put the demo on one side and this walkthrough on the other so you can read a step and do it without flipping back and forth. Two monitors works best. On one screen, snap each window to half: click the demo window and press ⊞ + ←, then this window and press ⊞ + → (on Windows). The demo opens in a new tab when you click Launch the demo above.
The demo is a fully working copy of Forms loaded with a sample organization, Riverside Community Alliance, and four forms it already runs: a Daily Food Log, a Volunteer Application, a Membership Signup, and an Annual Meeting RSVP. There is no sign-in and nothing you do is saved to a real account, so click freely. You will see a red DEMO MODE bar across the top with a Reset button if you ever want a clean slate.
In your real account these same screens hold your own forms, and every response goes into your organization's records where your team can read them.
Your task: stop retyping. Riverside collects pounds of food every day on a paper clipboard, and somebody spends the first evening of every month adding it up for the board. We are going to make the form do that part.
The opening screen lists every form your organization has, each with a green Open or grey Closed badge and a live count of how many responses it has taken. Everything you do to a form starts from its row: Edit, Responses, Copy link, Share, Close, and Delete.
Do this: Read down the four forms and notice the response counts. Those numbers are the whole point: they are answers already collected, with nothing retyped.
Why it matters: a form that is open and a form that is closed look different at a glance, so you never hand out a link to something that stopped accepting answers.
Click Edit on the Daily Food Log. A form is just a title, a short description, and a list of questions. Each question has a label, a type, and a Required checkbox, and the small up and down arrows on each one reorder them.
Do this: Look at which questions are marked Required and which are not. Then use the arrows to move a question up one place, and watch the numbering update.
Why it matters: every question you mark Required costs you some submissions. Seeing the whole form at once is what lets you be honest about which ones truly are.
Click Add field. You get eleven types: Short text, Long text, Email, Phone, Number, Dropdown, Multiple choice, Checkboxes, Date, File upload, and Consent checkbox. Dropdown, Multiple choice, and Checkboxes take a list of options, one per line.
Do this: Add a field, label it Pounds collected, and set its type to Number. Then add another labeled Site and set it to Dropdown, with a few site names on separate lines.
The Number type is the one that matters most and the one most people miss. A number typed into a Short text box is only text, so it can never be totalled. A Number field is stored as a number, commas and spaces are stripped on the way in so "67,250" is saved as 67250, and a non-numeric answer is refused with a message naming the question.
Why it matters: this single choice is the difference between a monthly report that adds itself up and a spreadsheet somebody has to clean by hand first.
Any question can be set to appear only when an earlier answer matches a particular value. On the field you want to hide, choose the earlier question and the answer that should reveal it.
Do this: Add a Multiple choice question, Did anything go wrong on the route today?, with Yes and No. Then add a Long text question, What happened?, and set it to show only when the first answer is Yes.
Why it matters: the volunteer with a normal day answers one question instead of two, and you still get the full story on the days it matters. Short forms get filled in; long ones get abandoned.
Every response lands in the Responses screen no matter what. 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 copies by hand. A form can route into Contacts, Volunteers, or Members, and you tell it which of your questions holds the name, the email, and the phone.
Do this: Open the Volunteer Application and find its routing. Notice it files into Volunteers. Then look at the Daily Food Log and see that routing is off, because a pounds log should not create a new contact every day.
Why it matters: routing is what stops the double entry. It is also worth turning off deliberately, so your Contacts list does not fill up with duplicates of the same five volunteers.
Click Share on any form. The public link is permanent, so it can go on a printed flyer without expiring. Beside it you get a snippet to put a button on your own website, a downloadable QR code, and ready-written invitation wording for an email or a social post. You can also hand the form straight to your newsletter or a marketing campaign in one click.
Do this: Open Share, download the QR code, and copy the public link. Keep the link on your clipboard; you will use it in the next step.
Why it matters: the public form carries your organization's own name and branding, not ours, so somebody opening it recognizes who is asking before they read a word.
Paste the link into a new tab. This is what the public sees: no sign-in, no app to install, and a layout built for a phone. A volunteer can add the link to their home screen and it behaves like an app.
Do this: Start filling it in, then close the tab halfway through on purpose and open the link again. Your answers are still there.
Answers save themselves on the person's own device as they type, and come back if the page is closed by accident, the phone rings, or the battery dies. The draft clears once they submit, so the next person to use that phone starts fresh and never sees a stranger's half-finished answers. There is nothing to switch on and nothing for them to do.
Why it matters: this is the difference between a daily log that gets filled in from a parking lot and one that quietly stops after two weeks.
Back in the app, click Responses on the form you just submitted to. Answers appear newest first in a table you can scan, and any uploaded files can be downloaded from here.
Do this: Find your own submission at the top, then click the CSV download and open it in a spreadsheet.
A busy form shows the most recent 500 at a time with a Load more control and tells you the true total, so the screen stays fast. The CSV always contains every response, not just the page on screen, so an export is never quietly cut short. You can also link straight to one form's responses using an address ending in /forms/?responses= and the form's token, which makes a good bookmark.
Why it matters: a report that silently stops at 500 rows is worse than no report, because you would not know to distrust it.
This is the step that gives you the evening back. Any form can email your team a plain-language summary of its own responses weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually, to any list of addresses.
Do this: In the Daily Food Log, find Scheduled summary reports, set it to Monthly, and add an address.
The summary is not a data dump. It has the key figures, a breakdown for each question, and field notes pulled out of the open comment answers, written the way a person would write them. For Riverside that means the monthly pounds total, the split by site, and the recurring comments arrive on the first of the month with nobody assembling anything.
Why it matters: the reason most organizations cannot tell you last quarter's numbers is not that the data is missing. It is that adding it up was always somebody's unpaid evening.
The same summary becomes a document you would be comfortable handing to a board: one click produces a Word file on your organization's own letterhead.
Do this: Open the report view and produce the board report. Download it and open it in Word.
From there you can save it to your Document Library so the whole team can find it, print it for the meeting, or email it as an attachment.
Why it matters: the numbers, the formatting, and the letterhead are the three things people redo by hand the night before a board meeting. This is all three at once.
Every All In One Nonprofit app shares one secure, organization-wide Document Library, and the board reports you generate here can be saved straight into it.
Do this: Open the Document Library and see where a saved report would land.
Why it matters: one shared home for your documents means nothing lives only on one person's computer, and the current version is always easy to find.
If you ever get stuck, the Contact support link opens a help request tied to your account. You describe what you need, send it, and our team replies by email, and you can follow the whole conversation from the support page.
Do this: Open Contact support to see the request form. Signed in to your real account, you can send a message and then track replies and status right there.
Why it matters: real help from real people is part of the product, so you are never left staring at a blank screen on your own.
You built a form, chose the field type that makes the totals work, shared it, filled it in the way a volunteer would, read the responses, and set the monthly numbers to arrive on their own. Explore the other three demo forms, or reset it and try it your own way.