Forms is the infoodle module for collecting information from people — whether that's event registrations, membership sign-ups, donation pledges, surveys, or contact requests. A form is built once by an admin, shared publicly via a link, QR code, or embedded on your website, and submissions arrive back in infoodle as entries for an admin to review and approve.
The lifecycle of a form
Every form moves through three stages:
- Build — you design the form in the form designer, choosing which fields to include and how they behave.
- Publish — you make the form live. A public link, QR code, and embed snippet are generated. Anyone with the link can submit the form.
- Approve — submitted entries land in infoodle. An admin reviews each entry and approves it, which writes the data to the relevant contact record, group, or finance record.
Building a form
Open Forms from the main menu and click Add to create a new form, or select an existing form to edit it.
The form designer is organised into tabs:
| Tab | What it does |
|---|---|
| Build form | Drag fields from the left-hand palette into your form |
| Settings | Set open/close dates, custom CSS, and other form-level options |
| Approval | Configure who is notified, auto-approval rules, and workflows to run on approval |
| Email response | Set up the thank-you email sent to the person after they submit |
| Pledge confirmation | For forms that capture recurring giving commitments |
| Preview | See the form as a submitter would |
| Publish | Get your public link, QR code, and embed snippet |
| Versions | View the history of published versions |
Field types
The field palette offers fields grouped by category:
- Contact details — name, address, email, phone, gender, and identifiers like Person Safe ID
- Independent fields — text, numbers, lists, tick boxes, dates, and web addresses
- Contact permissions — OK to email, phone, text, or post
- Group fields — add the submitter to a group on approval
- Custom fields — your organisation's custom people, household, or group fields
- Finance fields — amount, account code, campaign, payment method, and recurring pledge period
- Layout — headings, images, HTML widgets, file upload, signature, and page breaks
Publishing a form
When your form is ready, click the green Publish button. This:
- Creates an immutable snapshot of the form (version 1, 2, 3, and so on)
- Generates a permanent public link the first time
- Makes the form live immediately — all existing links and embedded instances update automatically
Important: Clicking Save while editing does not update the live form. You must click Publish to push changes live. Until you do, the previous published version continues to serve.
For more information see Publishing a form
Editing a published form
To change a live form, click Edit form. This creates a new draft version without taking the live form offline. You can save and test your changes freely — submitters continue to see the previous published version until you click Publish again.
If your form shows Editing status in the Forms list, it means someone on your team has opened it for editing but not yet published. The live form is unaffected. The person who started editing needs to either publish or cancel their changes before others can edit.
For more information see Editing Forms
Sharing a form
Once published, the Publish tab gives you three ways to share:
- Public link — a permanent URL you can share in emails, newsletters, or social media
- QR code — download and print for physical signage or event materials
- Embed snippet — paste into your website to display the form inline (also works with Rocketspark sites — see Rocketspark)
Reviewing and approving entries
Submitted entries appear under Forms > [your form] > Entries. Each entry shows the submitted data and lets an admin:
- Match or create a contact — link the entry to an existing person or create a new one
- Review the data — check field values before committing them
- Approve — write the data to infoodle (updating the contact record, adding to groups, recording a transaction, and so on)
Depending on your form's Approval settings, entries may be auto-approved (processed immediately on submission) or held in a queue for manual review.
Entries that contain finance data — such as a donation amount or recurring pledge — require the approver to have the appropriate finance permissions. See Permissions for details.
Form versioning
Every time you publish a form, infoodle saves a new version. This means:
- Entries submitted under an older version always render correctly against the form as it was at the time of submission
- You can view the full version history on the Versions tab
- You can safely update a live form without losing historical entry data
Inherited forms
When you create a new form, you can choose to inherit it from an existing form. The new form becomes a child of the original (parent) form. Changes made to the parent flow through to all child forms automatically, while each child can still have its own field configurations and settings. This is useful when you run similar forms for multiple regions, locations, or cohorts.