Do you need your clients to give you information about themselves prior to coming to a yoga class or a therapy treatment? A really easy way to do this is to create an online form that sits on your website, so your new client can easily find it and send you the details you need without lots of emails or paper changing hands.

I have experimented with a few ways to do this but have found Google Forms to be a neat and free way to do it.

How do you create a Google Form?

1. You need a Google account – if you don’t have one they are free and easy to set up. Go to www.google.com and create a sensible username (you might use this more in the future and regret using something silly!) and set a password (make sure it is secure, you are going to be collecting personal data)
2. Go to your Google Drive
3. Click ‘Create’ and select Form
4. Choose a template – keep it simple if you are adding it to your website so the designs don’t clash
5. Start by adding a name for your form
6. Then add in a title that your clients will see and a short description explaining what the form is for
7. Add your fields – you can add text fields for name, address etc., multiple choice fields for things such as health conditions, checkboxes for yes and no answers and paragraphs for questions with longer, narrative answers
8. You can set some questions to have required answers so have a think about what you absolutely need to know and what is just desirable, this will help your client fill in the form and not get frustrated if they don’t have an answer for everything, but also ensure the crucial information is not skipped over
9. Preview your form and check that it works – make up a dummy client and fill in the answers so you know they make sense – and submit the form
10. Return to the form and click on Responses (which should now show a 1 next to it). ‘View responses’ and it should offer to let you see them in a spreadsheet, which you should say yes to. From now on it will save all your responses in this spreadsheet, which is saved in your Google Drive and can be accessed independently to your form
11. Go to the menu and chose File and then ‘Embed my form’, copy the code and paste that it into the HTML view of a new page of your website
12. Publish your page on your website
13. Bingo – you have a fully functioning form on your website. And if you need to update it, all you have to do is edit the Google Form and it will automatically update on your website
14. Finally a note about data – when collecting personal data from clients you must abide by the Data Collection Act

Good luck with building your form.

If you do get stuck, which I am sure you won’t, or feel you’d rather get someone else to do it for you, then get in touch. I can build your form, and depending on how your website is built and hosted, add it to your site for you.

Prices start at just £20 for a basic form.

Email lucy@omlinetraining.com if you’d like to find out more.