You can finally say goodbye to your word documents and posted client referral forms. In this article, we teach you how to create online client referral forms. Feel free to use any of the below links to jump to the relevant section

Create a new form

Setup a process

Building the form

Change the layout

One thing before we get to the fun stuff... When making changes to your form, please do not forget to always "Apply Changes". If you do not, you may have to go and repeat all the lovely work you have done 😞

Go to the "Forms" page on the left hand of the Staff Dashboard, under the "Forms and Submissions" header.

Press the "New Form" button. The type will be a "Client referral" form. Give the form a name, the most important part is that this is recognisable to your teams internally. If you will be making numerous different client referral forms, they need to be clearly named to understand what that client submission relates to.

You will be asked to select a process, if this is the first form you are setting up you will need to create a process.

"But what is a process?"

A process is essentially the steps you need to take as an organisation after that client referral submission is received. Each client submission will pick up the process assigned to the form they submitted through. Your team will then be able to change the statuses of each stage and add notes allowing you to manage the new submissions through to completion. For example...

It is important to capture all stages that may be needed. If a particular client does not require a particular stage for whatever reason, that is fine, your team can just complete that stage on the submission and add relevant notes. One other point worth noting here, the stages do not need to be completed in order.

Now just add a support contact email and select the staff users who should receive notifications when you receive submissions from that form.

The step about references may not be relevant so it doesn't matter what you decide for this step.

You can see the available fields on the left-hand side of the Staff Dashboard.

IMPORTANT - All fields you add will require you to enter a question. This is just to let the applicant know what you are asking for e.g. First Name, Last Name, Address First Line. If you fail to add a question to a field in the form, you will not be able to save the form.

Standard fields such as gender and email can be dragged and dropped into the form and then all you need to do is add the question.

Non-standard fields such as first name or address fields need to be created and linked to the relevant fields in Volunteero. For example, when building an address, you need to add 4 short answer fields, then you link them to the 4 Volunteero fields relating to the address, see below for an example.

You may ask other questions that do not have a corresponding field in Volunteero. These will always be saved and held on the volunteer record but you do not need to link these. Next, I will cover some common form requirements we see and how to set them up.

Agree to policies and terms - Do you need volunteers to agree to terms, data policies or anything else? Well, you can do so using this feature. Add a "Checkboxes" field to the form. Add a question that says something like "Please confirm you agree to...." Now in the description section just below the question, add the link to the policy or terms on your website to which they need to read and agree. Finally, add one answer labelled "I agree". Please see below.

File upload - As you will see, there is a field which is called "File Upload". This does what it says on the tin. If you do require numerous documents to be uploaded, we recommend you add numerous document upload fields and specify what you are looking for with each.

Add a logo by dragging a "Rich text and media" field. On the left-hand side, you will see various icons which are the formatting and styling elements. One of these is an image icon, select this. You then need to add the image address. In order to find this, find your logo either by google image search or on your website, right-click on the image and select "Copy image address". It is this that you paste into the Insert Image field in the Staff Dashboard.

Add welcome text by the "Rich text and media" field and you can then add some text to give the volunteer applicant some context and perhaps even a message of thanks for their interest. We have also found that volunteers appreciate you providing some idea of the next steps e.g. We will be in touch within 7 days.

Reorder questions by clicking and holding the grid icon on the field you wish to move (as seen below) and then move to the desired position.

Layout fields side by side by clicking on the field you wish to change, you will see this option on the left-hand side (below) here you can choose if the width of the field should be 100% or 50%. You can have two fields alongside each other to cut down the overall length of the form. This helps improve the overall look and feel of the form as well as conserve space. Then you can simply drag and drop fields to rearrange them.

You have put in the work and have a beautiful online form ready to go. Now you need to share it. Click on the "Share form" button and you will have two options

And now you are ready to go. Time to grab a coffee and watch the new client referrals come flying in. Check out our article on Manage Form Submissions article for more information on what to do once they start rolling in 🥳

If you require any further assistance, please use the support chat to ask a question to our friendly support team. We will be happy to help!