Forms

Forms are the front door. They are how a stranger on your website turns into a lead inside your CRM. Everything else in this guide (stages, automations, the handoff into the CCMS) only happens because a parent filled out a form first.

No forms, no leads. No leads, nothing for the CRM to do. This is the chapter that turns your setup into something a real family can actually use.

When a guardian fills out a form, every answer gets saved to the lead's profile automatically. If that family ends up enrolling, anything you've mapped also flows straight into the CCMS, so the parent isn't retyping the same info twice. That is the whole point: ask once, use everywhere.

The two forms almost every school needs

You can build as many forms as you want, and most schools do end up with a handful. But there are two that show up on nearly every site, and they do very different jobs. Knowing which is which is what makes the rest of this chapter click.

You can absolutely build more (waitlist forms, summer camp forms, returning family forms), but inquiry and tour are the two you'll almost always start with.

1. Building the form (fields are just properties)

The fields on a form are not their own separate thing. Every field is one of the properties you set up in Chapter 1. That is why properties came first: you can't ask for something on a form unless the CRM has a place to put the answer.

Three fields ship on every new form and cannot be removed: Guardian Name, Guardian Email, Student Name. Everything else is up to you. Click Add guardian property, Add lead property, or inside the Student(s) block to pick from the properties you already have.

The Form label is what the parent actually sees

Every field has a Property (the internal name, like Source) and a Form label (what the parent reads on the form, like "How did you hear about us?"). The property stays consistent across every form so your data lines up. The label is yours to phrase however sounds most human.

Conditional logic (show a field only when it matters)

Next to each field there is a small two-arrow icon. That opens a rule builder where you can say "only show this field if an earlier answer equals X." For example, only ask Waitlist preference if the family picked Waitlist earlier in the form. It keeps the form short and only asks what actually applies.

2. Settings: the one setting people get wrong

Once your fields are in, click the Settings tab at the top of the form builder. Most of what's in here is straightforward (success page title, what shows after submit). But there is one setting that quietly changes how the rest of your CRM behaves, and it has to be set per form.

The other settings (quick tour)

• Make fields required by default−
  A blanket toggle for new fields you add. You can still flip individual fields on or off after.
• What happens after submit+
• Success page title and subtitle+

3. Getting the form in front of parents

A form sitting inside the CRM doesn't do anything. It has to live somewhere a parent can actually find it. There are three ways to share it, and most schools use all three.

Making the embed look like your school

Click Embed above and the branding panel opens: a Custom theme toggle, an accent color, a font, and a spot for your logo.

One quick note: these controls only apply to the embedded version. The share link and the QR code always open the standard Playground look, and the form inside the CRM never changes.

What's next

Chapter 4 is Emails. You've got a form people can fill out, so the next step is what the CRM says back to them. After that comes SMS, Conversations, and Tasks, and then Chapter 8, Availability and Meetings, where a parent can actually book a tour.