What is the Form Builder?
The form builder allows you to gather information from your community in a more accurate and efficient manner. This can be used in a variety of cases such as collecting permissions and consents from parents, collecting surveys from students, or collecting qualitative reports from your staff.
The Form Builder is included in our Unify product, a crucial set of features that allow Orah schools to collate and view information from their community quickly and easily.
Accessing the Form Builder
Administrators can access the form builder settings from within the Admin Console, under the Unify product heading.
Form Types
There are different types of forms you can create depending on who the form is for. Each form type has options that make it more effective at collecting information from your chosen audience. This includes staff, parents, students, and you can also create public-facing forms that anyone with the link can complete.
Note: For parents to fill out a form, they must have a connected Orah account so that their response(s) can be tied to the appropriate student(s).
Forms can be used to collect information on specific students or general information. Student information will be saved directly to a student's profile record and/or can be used to directly update student database information. Assigned students can either be hard coded into the form settings or set by staff on an ad-hoc basis. General information forms can be used to collect any other type of information that’s not linked directly to students.
Building the Form
The form builder provides the ability to customize your form to suit your needs. You can apply different response types (paragraph, multi-choice, file attachments, dates, signatures, etc), make this question required, and preview what this form will look like for your recipient.
Using Forms to Update Student Information
Questions included in a Form can be connected to specific Student Profile fields, meaning that the response provided will automatically update that field in the student's profile and in the Student Database.
In this case, the response to the question would update the Driving Permissions field added by the school into their Students' profiles.
Form Collection Options
Form submissions can be collected in two ways, by creating a campaign or by making a form available for ad-hoc submissions.
Campaigns
Form responses can be collected by creating campaigns that ask (and remind) the assigned recipients to complete the form. The available recipients depend on the type of form. (i.e. Only staff can complete staff forms, only parents can complete parent forms and so forth.) Depending upon the recipient type, campaign notifications and reminders can be sent via email, push notification, or both.
You can also set the frequency of the campaign as one-off, repeating, or initiated by staff on an ad-hoc basis, depending on how often you want to collect submissions for this form.
Ad-Hoc Forms
Ad-hoc forms are available in the intended submitter's account on an as-needed basis. Examples of ad-hoc forms include maintenance reports, duty logs, or permission slips that do not have a required due date.
Confirmation Messages and Conditional Messaging
After selecting your audience, creating your form, and determining the collection options, you can set the messaging that the submitter will receive when they have completed the form.
A confirmation message lets the submitter know that they have properly submitted the form and gives you the opportunity to give them any additional messaging or instructions, if needed.
In the case that you need to give the submitter specific messaging based on one or more of their responses in the form, you have the opportunity to set up conditional messages.
In this example, a form sent to a student asked if the student would like a staff member to speak with them. In the conditional response, we are able to say that if they respond 'Yes' the system will send them a different confirmation message than if they had responded 'No'.
In addition to sending a more personalized message to the submitter, conditional responses also give you the option of sending an email alert to one or more staff members about the response. In this example, we can email the specific house parent letting them know that a student has requested follow up.
If you have any questions after reading through, click the blue chat icon at the bottom right-hand corner of this page. This will start a conversation with one of Orah's Team.