Creating Forms

General Form Guidance

These are some general tips to keep in minds when creating forms:

  • Keep the forms as simple as possible.
  • Avoid asking for unnecessary information, especially if it is sensitive.
  • Provide helper text to assist people to fill out the form correctly

Choosing a Form Provider

Our CMS OmniUpdate is changing the way that forms are handled. They plan to roll out their new forms over the next year and have all forms be in the new format by year end 2026.

Briefly, the major relevant changes are:

  • For security reasons, auto-response emails will not display submission content directly. Users will be required to login to Omni and view the form submissions in the form itself.
  • These submissions are version-based so any time the form is updated, future submissions are separated out into a new section
  • This also forces the recipient to have a valid Omni account in order to view the responses.

While in the past we have always encouraged users to create Omniupdate forms over other providers such as Google Forms, we recognize that this is a significant change that may no longer meet the needs of many of the users. As such, please note the following guidance on form usage on the website:

Guidance on Choosing a Form System

To determine what system to use when creating or linking to a form:

  • Event Registrations / RSVPs

    Forms that collect RSVPs for events are best handled in B-Engaged. Each department/group on campus can set up a group and the system has wonderful event management tools.

  • Contact or Inquiry Forms

    The primary focus of these forms is to notify a user of the information in the form so that the form submitter can be contacted. As it is usually more important to receive the data and reply to it in a timely manner, we recommend these be recreated in Google Forms.

    We have built a as a base for you to start from.

  • Feedback, Registration, and Other Forms

    For many other forms the purpose is do collect data that may wish to be analyzed later. We recommend using Google Forms and setting the form to save responses to a Google Sheet.