Forms: Introduction and Setup

Forms let you collect information from respondents at your school or elsewhere. You could use them for nearly anything; here are some examples:

• Alumni surveys to gauge interest in fundraising events
• Dorm room maintenance requests
• Parking permit application
• Course substitution requests filled out by an advisor on behalf of a student
• Application for internal scholarships
• Academic program change requests...

...and so on.

Forms are created and managed in Home > Forms.

• Below you'll find instructions for how to create a new form.
• This article describes how to design a form with headings, text, and fields.
• This article describes how to send the form to respondents and process the responses.

Creating a new form

To create a new form:

1. Go to Home > Forms and click the Manage Forms link.
2. Click Add a Form.
3. Give the form a name.
4. Click Save.
5. You'll be taken to the form's page, where you can begin to add fields and configure its settings.

Managing access to the form

"Access" to a form refers to whether a staff user at your school is able to view, edit, or manage the form and its responses (it does not refer to the kind of access a respondent would need to fill out the form).

If the form is not accessible to you or one of your user roles, you will not be able to view, edit, or manage it! Make sure that when you manage access (see below), one of your roles has the appropriate access level, or give yourself Manage access.

• To access a form at all, a person must be an active user at your school and have the Staff role.
• Manage form means the user can update the form, edit form access, add/edit notifications, send form requests, regenerate the form's URL, add/edit categories, and delete/retire the form.
• Manage responses lets the user process responses.
• Edit form gives the user the ability to update the form's fields and settings.
• View form and responses lets the user view the form and responses, but not make any changes or requests.
• Request responses lets a user send form requests.

You can give form access to people with particular user roles or individual staff members. To manage access to the form:

1. Click Manage access.
2. Choose the user role to which you wish to give access, or search for individual staff users.
   • By default, all Staff users can access all forms. But, if you choose, for example, Academic Admin, you will limit access to users with the Academic Admin role.
3. Choose the access level.
4. When you're done, click Save.

Form settings

The form's settings determine how it will work for respondents and how you'll be able to use it.

• Link/Embed Code: Once you publish a form, Populi will generate a link that you can send to respondents when you request a form response. If you do not require a login, Populi will generate an embed code that lets you include the form in an external web page. See below for more information about the Published and Login Required settings. Below the embed code you'll have an option to get a QR code for the form. People can use their smartphone's camera (or a QR scanner app) to scan the code and go directly to the form.
  1. Click Get QR Code.
  2. Modify the code's appearance as desired—you can change the color, add/remove the Populi logo, change the size, and change the module types.
  3. When you're ready, click Download.
  4. An .SVG file will download to your computer. You can then incorporate the QR code into any kind of printed matter.
• Published: Only published forms can accept responses. Otherwise, they're in Draft mode and only available to users with Manage or Edit access (see above).
  • Once a form is published, you can choose to list it in the "Self-service" area in Home > Forms. This will let any logged-in user fill it out without you needing to send them a response request (provided, of course, that the form is available—availability is managed in the Accept Responses setting).
• Accept Responses: Once published, the form can accept responses...
  • Yes: Anyone with access to the form's link can submit a response to it.
  • By request: Someone with Read access (or better) to the form must send a request to respondents to fill out the form.
  • For Yes and By Request, you can set an availability period for the form.
  • No: The form will be closed off from responses altogether.
• Login required: Yes requires respondents to log in before filling in the form. Form responses are automatically linked to the user who responded. If you select No, and no login is required...
  • Respondents will be able to initiate a response to the form wherever the form is embedded or its generic link is provided (see Link/Embed code, above).
  • Populi generates an embed code that lets you include the form in an external web page. You'll also see the Custom CSS setting further down in the settings.
  • If you send a form request to a Populi user, the user will still need to log in if they access the form via the request's URL.
  • Forms will include a Captcha in the event that too many attempts are made to fill out the form in a given timeframe. This is a security measure that should seldom, if ever, affect respondents.
• Respondent Permissions: This setting controls whether the form respondent can submit a response on behalf of another person. For example, you might have a course substitution form that advisors fill out on behalf of their advisees.
  1. In the edit dialog, choose a role—users with this role will be given specific permissions with this form.
  2. Choose what kind of responses this role may submit.
  3. If the role can submit responses on behalf of someone else, choose the roles or people for whom they may do that. Your options here will depend on the role to which you're giving permissions.
  4. Remove a permission by clicking .
  5. Click Save to finish.
• Anonymous: If set to Yes, this hides all identifying information about the respondent from all users.
• Response review: When a user with Manage responses access to the form is processing responses, what kind of review are they giving? Decision lets them approve or reject the form and individual fields; Review lets them mark the form Completed.
• Limits: If you wish to limit the number of responses to the form—whether per-user or for the form as a whole—here's where you set that limit!
• Description: In the event that you're listing the form for self-service, enter a description that will appear in Home > Forms.
• Header Image: People love pictures. Here you can upload an image that will display in the form's header.
• Fee: Requires the respondent to pay a fee before submitting their responses; you can choose to allow student respondents to charge the fee to their accounts.
• Discount Codes: If you've set up a fee for the form, you'll be given the option to create one or more discount codes. You can go with the auto-generated random-character code, or enter your own, together with the discount amount/percent and start/end dates for when it will be valid.
• Custom CSS: CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a programming language that lets you change the look and feel of a website. If you do not require a login for the form, you can enter your own CSS here to better integrate an embedded form in your school's website. We recommend that an experienced programmer compose the CSS in another editor and copy-paste it into this field. Improperly-composed CSS can render the form unusable, so take special care with this field!
• Thank you message: After the form is submitted, you can choose to display a custom "Thank you" message to the respondent. Use the WYSIWYG editor to compose the message; you can also include an optional file that the respondent can download from the "Thank you" screen.
• Redirect URL: This sends the respondent from the "Thank you" screen to another web page automatically.
• Default Localization: Choose a localization if you wish to translate the form's interface elements for non-English-speaking respondents.
• Categories: Categories help you classify your forms.

Once your form's settings and notifications are set up to your liking, you can start designing it.