Guide
Code was written, bugs were smashed, and developers were only moderately sleep deprived: it is time to release your first private beta and grab some feedback.
Form View is an ideal way to do this. This guide will take you through how to create a simple form, link it to a CRM, and share it via a URL.
Explore the Sales CRM
Every contact you make is a potential networking, partner, or sales opportunity so we want to make sure that it is in some way linked to a CRM to prevent a data silo. There are two ways to do this: install the Sales CRM template and modify it to suit us, or create a new database to capture beta testers that are then linked to a CRM.
🤔 With any form you make, take a moment to choose which option is best for your use case based on the goal of the data you are collecting and who needs to be aware of changes.
Option 1: Modify an Existing Database
Find Templates at the bottom of the sidebar, and search for CRM. Choose the Sales CRM and install it.
If you haven't seen this space before, feel free to go through the readme - we put some suggestions on how to customize every template you install.
Click on the Sales CRM space and take a look at the databases that are installed.
The Account database is for a company with many contacts (one-to-many), and we are collecting individual users at this point. We are going to modify the Contact database and add a few new fields to make it more useful for this use case, however.
Add new fields
All views are built off of the fields in a database. We need at least a Name and an Email to contact them with instructions on how to participate in the beta (already there), but there is an opportunity to build a fuller profile of users interested in your product.
Here are some ideas to get you started:
Origin (text field)
Size (number field)
Insight (text field)
Updates (checkbox)
Option 2: Create a New Database
Creating a new database to hold form data means we need to decide which Space it lives in. To answer this question, look at your workspace and ask yourself which person or department should own this data. Is it your sales team? Create it in a CRM-oriented Space. Does the product owner want to keep an eye on new entries? Maybe in software development then.
We're making this specifically for lead capture, so let's stick with the CRM. Create a new database and add the fields you need.
Create a Form View
Find one of your Spaces and click the + button to add a new View. Form will be listed with the beta tag beside it.
Click Form and you will be brought to a blank page. In the top right of your screen, there will be a dropdown asking you to select a Database.
And just like that, we have a form!
Modify the Form View
Notice on the right sidebar that the fields created in the Database you chose are the ones available as a field. You can choose which ones to show to the public and which ones are only used internally.
With each form view block, you can adjust whether the field is required, change the wording of the question, add a description, or add some default text in Rich Text fields to help users input what you intended them to.
Preview the form to see if you're happy with the flow and how it looks to the world wide web. Input some dummy data, press submit and watch an entry automagically appear in the contact database, proper relations and all!
Share to the public
To share the form with your users, click the Share button to generate a public link. This link is an ordinary URL, you can put it anywhere URL's go. Here are some ideas to get you started:
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