Online forms are an indispensable communication and data collection tool for schools, providing staff with an easy and efficient way to streamline important and logistical tasks and stay connected.

That's because forms serve as one of the first points of engagement for prospective and new families — and then again through daily school life with permission slips, lunch orders, concert tickets, and so on. 

With this in mind, we’ve recently released Forms Plus, a powerful new add-on for Finalsite Forms, that offers enhanced registration capabilities to make managing the registration processes more efficient, easier, and effective. 

With Forms Plus, admins can now:

• Build forms easier than ever in an improved interface
• Collect different types of attendee information in more fields
• Analyze form submissions in an advanced admin interface
• Add an accessible countdown timer for accurate registrations

Let’s take a closer look at what Forms Plus offers!

Finalsite Forms Plus: Enhanced online registration software for schools

When it comes to Forms Plus, many of the new additions come from the new Registration and RSVP fields, which essentially powers everything in the online form builder. Forms users no longer need to navigate through multiple panels to adjust registration settings like in the older Forms Manager module and the Registration Manager add-on.

The Registration Field allows teams to collect attendee data, including up to three customizable fields, and numerical data.

Then we have the RSVP field on your school's form, which adds the ability to reserve a number of seats for each person that chooses to RSVP for an event, with additional functionality.

Discount Fields allow users to add discounts with conditional rules, such as providing a discount when someone purchases three or more tickets. Additionally, bulk discounting can also be done in the new Discounts Field, without the hassle of editing seating types.

Now that we’re all on the same page as to what Forms Plus adds to Finalsite Forms, let’s go over some of the benefits of managing the registration process with Forms Plus. 

1. Easily build online registration forms for your school with an improved interface

Forms Plus offers a simple, quick, and easy form-building experience for admins.

Built with simplicity in mind, the new Forms Plus add-on pulls in all of the features of the old Registration Manager and the previous iteration of the Forms Plus add-on and combines them to the same field list as the core Forms fields, making adding and editing registration fields in Finalsite Forms as simple as dragging and dropping the fields and directly editing them through the side panel.

Previously, you would add the registration fields to the form and adjust the settings in one window, then navigate to the separate Registration section and adjust the settings through separate tabs.

Now, that process is all done in the core Finalsite Forms window. It’s a faster, simpler, and much more efficient process that’s likely to save you time while creating forms for your school. 

2. Collect different types of attendee information in fields

Let’s say you were building a summer camp registration form and you wanted to collect t-shirt sizes for three groups of campers: junior campers, campers, and senior campers.

Forms Plus simplifies that process, allowing you to add multiple customizable fields to each attendee group directly in the forms-building interface.

Using that same summer camp example above, we were able to build a registration form with Forms Plus that has a section for each camper group, all with the same age, t-shirt size, and grade level. The entire process of adding the three customizable fields took moments, all without the hassle of jumping back and forth between several different windows.

Each camper group used all of the available customization fields, but you could easily choose to collect different information for each camper group.

For example, you could collect which home state the senior campers are from instead of their age if you’re a boarding school — that information is more important than collecting both the camper’s age and grade level.

3. Analyze form submissions in an advanced admin interface

Now that we have some submissions with our summer camp example, we can now take a look at what type of information we’ve collected and how it’s presented in the updated Submissions section that comes with Forms Plus.

With Forms Plus, all the information is condensed into the same window (and a single row per form) so you can quickly see what type of information was collected from each submission.

For example, by clicking on the first row we can see that we have a form submission with one camper of each type (junior camper, camper, and senior camper), as well as the transaction total. In this case, we can also see that this submitter is paying through a “check-by-mail” option and that we still need to collect payment for this submission. 

You can also use the review log toward the bottom to see who reviewed the form and when, which is especially helpful if you have multiple admins creating and monitoring forms and submissions.

The new Roster section allows users to view form submissions as a list of all the attendees who signed up for the event through a form, including information entered into any of the custom fields we created specifically for that form. 

The roster feature also allows admin users to edit the roster for any mistakes the submitter made but didn’t catch before submitting the form. It’s a quick and handy way of making sure you know exactly who and how many people will be attending your summer camp, graduation events, and so on. 

4. An accessible countdown timer for accurate registrations

For those frustrated while waiting on a website all day to buy event or concert tickets, only to be blocked from actually purchasing tickets, we feel your pain. (Oh hey, Swifties!)

With Forms Plus, once a user starts filling out a form, a timer will start counting down from 15 minutes — one of my personal favorite new features of Forms Plus. Once that timer hits zero, the form will refresh and all updates made to the form will be lost.

This handy little timer prevents the rare occasions when two people register for the same tickets at the same time. Additionally, once the timer hits the one-minute mark, a pop-up will appear to ask the user if they need more time to fill out the form. If so, the user will be given a couple of extra minutes to complete and submit the form.

This was added to help those using screen readers or other accessibility tools and services complete the form without feeling rushed or being cut off when they need the extra time to go through the options. 

For those who do need those extra few minutes, the addition is a lifesaver.

Key takeaway

Forms Plus elevates the already powerful Finalsite Forms to make managing the registration process easier — for families and users. By using Forms Plus, your school can avoid getting bogged down in event registration logistics, and spend more time focusing on hosting amazing events and improving a family’s user experience.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As Finalsite’s Product Marketing Specialist, Andrew writes blogs and creates videos to share information about all the latest and greatest Finalsite products. Andrew has more than 10 years of video production experience and a journalism education from the University of South Carolina. He is excited about bringing his experience and expertise to Finalsite.