Our new school website form builder does exactly what it says – helps you to build forms to add to your school website. We have made the process simple, quick, and given you lots of flexibility.

There are many ways online forms can help save you time:

• Obtaining parental permissions
• For prospective parents to request information
• For prospective parents/students to sign up to Open Day tours
• For current parents to request a meeting/parents’ evening slot
• Request for individual school tours
• Register for a place on your waiting list
• Surveying current or prospective parents
• General contact forms
• Loads more…!

You may currently use a plug-in or external provider to make a form for you to link parents to or to send in email. Our form builder makes it easier by keeping everything within your school website. This saves on paying for pro versions of other survey and form builders as well as giving you control within the CMS of your current site. It also means the form sits neatly onto a website page rather than sending parents and visitors off to a third party site which they may not trust.

Different question types

You can add text response questions, multiple choice, single select, and you can configure date and number range responses also.

You choose which questions are required and which are optional.

Gather data

Answers entered can be analysed within the form builder tool or exported as a .csv file which is compatible with most other systems you may use to add respondents or answers to a database, or to send out emails as follow up. This file can also be imported into your chosen spreadsheet provider – Excel, Google Sheets etc – to allow you to drill down into the information however you wish.

Acknowledge responses

Your respondents can receive a confirmation message or you can redirect them to another page of the website when they have submitted their form to keep them navigating for further information.

Make it public or private

You could add password protection for the page required to access the survey, in a parent area for example, or you can add a question as part of the form to filter out those who you do not wish to use the form. Or you may ask a question which helps you to group the responses by pupil/parent/prospective parent and so on. By asking for email addresses and a question about further contact, you can also create mailing lists of prospective parents.

Spam Reduction

By using a free plugin you can add Captcha boxes to your forms to avoid any spam use of the form. Our help guide shows you how to do this.

Advanced questioning

You can add trigger questions which will ensure people are only asked the relevant questions next based on previous answers, really useful for targeting the survey or to help create a more nuanced database of answers. This could be to separate prospective parents into those looking at nursery, primary, or secondary start years for example.

Cut down multiple emails to the office

In addition to the data stored within the form responses, you can set up email notifications to go to the person responsible, depending on the form. For example you may have a form to allow for reporting of possible safeguarding issues which triggers an email to the Designated Safeguarding Lead at the school.

Whatever you may need a form for, we know you will find the builder easy to set up and easy for respondents to reply to. Let us know how you use yours!

The Greenhouse form builder is free as part of the Greenhouse School Websites CMS.