Feature Showcase #6: Forms Manager

LIFT's new Forms Manager allows for far more functionality and customization in the interactive forms on your website.

The goal of LIFT's Forms Manager is to give you as much freedom as possible in how you collect information from prospects, existing tenants, or even other parties, on your LIFT-based website. In this post, we'll walk through some of the things you can do with this powerful feature.

Where is it?

In LIFT, you can go to "settings" (at the top right of any LIFT admin page), then take a look at the left sidebar. If your website supports the Forms Manager, you will see "Form Settings" in the sidebar.

Managing Forms

With this module, there is practically no limit to the number of different forms you can have on your website. Each form will fall into one of a few types:

• Contact Form (a general form for communication from a prospect or tenant)
• Inquiry Form (similar to Contact, but geared towards inquiring about a specific building or suite)
• Waiting List Form (like an Inquiry, but with special behaviour - see Waiting List Module)
• Maintenance Request Form (just what it sounds like!)
• Career Application (if you're using our Careers Module to display job postings on your website)
• Generic (any other kind of form that doesn't fit the above options)

Editing a form can be complicated if you really dive deep into it, but every type of form listed above will start you off with a sensible default template. You can pretty much just hit "Save" on a template and use it as-is if you want. There are also default fields you can add instead of having to create your own from scratch.

The Editor

The real meat of the customization comes from editing the fields with our drag-and-drop form editor. On the right-hand side is a list of premade fields (above the line) and field types (below), which you can just drag to the left to add to your form. We highly recommend using the premade fields when possible.

Fields come in all shapes and sizes: text boxes, dropdown lists, checkboxes, etc. You can even have file upload fields on any form!

Once a field is in the form, you can edit details about it. Each field can be customized in a number of ways, for example:

• Label
• Default value
• Validation (required / not required, or something specific like "email address")
• Conditional (advanced feature: show or hide depending on the value of another field)

This gives you a lot of flexibility in the information you want to ask for. Some of the more advanced options are hidden by default.

You can reorder your fields, delete ones you don't like, and even have fields that are hidden from the viewer (our team can have your website interact with hidden fields).

Messaging

Once a form is published, you can start getting responses from visitors - and surely you'll want to know about them.

Every response to your forms will be saved in LIFT, for you to view at your leisure (you can find them under "Inquiries" on LIFT's top bar), but by default the form will also send a notification email.

There are three types of messages each form can have:

1. A "standard" email (which normally goes out to your rental team)
2. An auto-response (immediate response to the person who submitted the form)
3. A follow-up (response to the submitter, but at a later date).

All email message subjects and bodies can be customized, and they can use "interpolation", which allows you to add dynamic info to the text, based on the submission.

 

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If you don't already have the Forms Manager for your LIFT-powered website, but are interested in the improved features and flexibility it offers, please don't hesitate to contact our sales or support teams.

Adding the Forms Manager to your website requires a small amount of development work (depending on how easy it is to upgrade your existing forms).

Thank you for reading about the Forms Manager!