Online forms are a wonderful way of collecting information: from potential adopters and volunteers, from community members who want help from your organization, or really, any purpose for which you need to gather contact information and other data.

Online forms (primarily adoption forms) can save you enormous amounts of time over using paper forms or sending forms in email. They enable your visitors to fill out the form and submit it to you without a phone call or email asking for a form, thus eliminating a step in the process and making it easier to adopt. You can set alerts to inform you when a form is completed, so you can immediately respond.

Using the Online Forms service, you can create custom online forms such as adoption, volunteer, and foster home applications. You can and track them online or export a form as a PDF, and . You can easily review forms submitted to you from anywhere you have access to the internet. 

Using the Online Forms service, you can cut the time and effort it takes to provide and view applications and other forms, and you can quickly access the forms which have been submitted. You can track the progress of the form through your system, and you can assign the form to a volunteer for follow-up. When you assign a form to a volunteer with a RescueGroups.org user account, that form is easily found using their My Forms link on their dashboard.

Some major benefits of using Online Forms:

• The entire form (questions and answers) stays on your website.
• Volunteers are immediately alerted (via email) when a form is completed.
• You can choose to either receive just an alert or an email with the form contents.
• We keep submitted forms indefinitely.
• You can easily add comments to a form, change the status of a form, assign the form to a volunteer to follow up, and track the progress of the form!

• You can capture contact information automatically and have it added to the forms.
• You can have your applicants added automatically as Contacts.

You can create as many forms as you need for your organization. Some common forms are Adoption Applications, Foster Applications, and Volunteer Applications.

When you create a form, certain information is can be automatically captured without your having to create questions. This information is captured when a user registers. You have the option of requiring visitors to register to complete any given form, or allowing unregistered visitors to fill out forms. This information can be captured  from the visitor's registration - you select the information:

• First name
• Last name
• Address, City, State, Zip/Postal Code
• Home Phone
• Work Phone
• Cell Phone
• Fax
• Email Address

Your organization's forms will appear to the visitor on their Forms page and on your site menu. If your visitors have registered on your site, any forms they have started will appear on their My Rescue page.

When visitors have not registered on your site and fill out a form, several things happen:

• Your form will not be displayed as pages, it will be on one page (you can also choose to have your questions on one page)
• The visitor's contact information will not be captured; therefore, visitors must fill out the fields. However, we do add the contact fields to your forms.
• You won't have the option to automatically add applicants to your Contact list

However, there are some people who object to registering on web sites. The choice is yours. Some groups give visitors the option of registering or not

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Need help Please open a support ticket and we can walk you through creating your form.

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A volunteer can choose to receive an alert when an online form is submitted.  The alert will be sent regardless of whether the online form is for an animal they are fostering or not.

Need help creating your online forms?

You can create your Online Forms forms easily by following these instructions: https://userguide.rescuegroups.org/x/lYBIf you would prefer the instructions in this guide. However, we know it can be intimidating. If you'd like, we can create your forms for you or we can give you advice and answer your questions.

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