Your Signup Form, or registration form, is an essential tool when building out your site and your community database. You can use it to collect important information about your community members. This is a basic Signup Form:
The benefits of registration
Registration can help you:
Understand contributions to your projects
Identify gaps in participation
Target specific community groups
Filter responses and reporting by demographic data
EngagementHQ is built around our Participant Relationship Manager tool, which allows you to segment and understand your community database. The questions you select for your registration form influence the information available and how you can analyze the database.
You can use Participant Demographic Attributes in your Signup Form to assist with accurate demographic analysis in your Dashboard reports. You can attach the Age attribute to the Date question and the Gender and Ethnicity attributes to Radio buttons, Checkboxes, or Dropdown questions. You can apply each attribute to one question at a time. Participants can manage and update the information they provide when they create their account in the Personal Info section of their profile.
Building your Signup Form
The questions you build into your Signup Form should be specific to your community or audience and align with your organization's objectives.
You need to set your form up before launching your site, and we do not recommend changing it after launch. Think about how you want to filter your PRM, analyze responses, and what demographics you want to identify in your community.
When you first look at your Signup Form, you’ll notice that there is a Suburb question, so you can use this demographic in your reporting and analysis. Currently, however, you cannot filter Survey Analysis using the Suburb information from registration or surveys.
We are working on a solution that will apply to new and existing data, so we recommend keeping the Suburb question in your Signup Form. In the meantime, we also recommend building your list of suburbs into a Dropdown question in your surveys by creating a master survey template which you can clone as you create new surveys.
To build your form:
Go to Site Settings > Signup Form.
To add a new question, select Add, choose your settings, and Create.
To remove a question, find it in your form and select Delete. Please note that there are some fields you can edit but not delete:
-Login
-Account Email
-Password
-Terms of Service
You can drag and drop questions to reorder them.
Preview your form to test it before launching your site.
You can include reCAPTCHA on your registration form by going to Site Settings > Privacy and Security > Sign Up Form and Enable Google's "reCAPTCHA" across your site.
Choosing your questions
You must choose appropriate questions because your Signup Form contributes directly to your database. We recommend creating a form that is long enough to give you essential demographic details but not long enough to discourage participation.
Here are a few questions we regularly see:
Introduction: you can add a Section to introduce the form and explain the benefits of registration.
Login: this is the user's screen name and one of the questions you cannot delete. However, you can edit the question to communicate how this is the public screen name used when participating with tools.
Password: another fixed question, which you can edit to include how to use the password or any rules you want to instate.
Name: you can include Single Line questions to ask participants for their names. Remember to reassure your community about how you will use this data.
Age: use the Date question to ask for participants' age. Many choose to Collect only year, to ask for a year of birth rather than the full date of birth. Asking for a year of birth rather than the full date will ensure that you can still apply the Age demographic without having to remind participants to update their information.
Gender: you can use a choice question, such as checkboxes or radio buttons, to ask participants for their gender. You should only ask this question if you deem it absolutely necessary to your database. Remember, you must be inclusive and respectful when asking for this information. Not acknowledging genders beyond male and female is exclusionary and offensive. At the least, we recommend including an option for "Prefer not to say." Again, reassure your community about how you will use this information.
Connection questions: you can use Checkboxes to ask questions beyond basic demographics and allow users to select multiple options. For example, you can identify your community's interests or relationship to your organization.
Community Panel or Reference Group: you might also want to add a question asking users if they want to participate in a community panel or reference group.
Terms of Service: this option cannot be deleted, but you may want to expand it to include references to subscriptions or newsletters for privacy reasons. You will need HTML format to format this message with links. You can add this sample text, but remember to replace the bold text with your information:
I agree to the <a href='/terms' target='_blank'>Terms of Use</a> and <a href='/privacy' target='_blank'>Privacy Policy</a> for using [Site name]. Registered users are automatically subscribed to receive newsletters from [Site name]. Our newsletters provide you with the latest customer engagement updates. <br><br><strong>Opt out</strong><br> If you don't wish to receive these newsletters, you'll have the ability to 'opt out' using the unsubscribe link on the footer on all of the newsletters we send you.
Finding the line between asking all the questions you want for your database and not deterring potential participants can be tricky. If you want to ask more but are worried about length, you can add conditional questions so users can opt in to offer more information.
If the user selects No, then they can immediately register. If they select Yes, further questions will appear before they register.
Changing your Signup Form after you've started gathering participant data can have unexpected impacts, so be careful when doing so. You can also customize the messages for an introduction to your registration page, and the welcome page users see after registration.
Note: On pages translated to a language other than English, the registration, sign-in, forgot password, or user profile pages will not open in the translated language, as Google has deprecated the translation feature. However, this will work if the in-built translator of the browser is used.