Forms are how you ask every client the same questions on a schedule without typing them out each week. Building one is the single best use of Basecamp over the phone: you are writing a questionnaire, and that wants a keyboard.
Forms need a paid plan. Basecamp names it: available on Performance and Infinity.
The six question types
- Short text: a word or a line.
- Long text: room to explain.
- Number: anything you want to compare week to week.
- Yes or no: unambiguous, and fast to answer.
- Date: when something happened.
- Select: a list of options you write. These need at least one option before the form will save.
Each question takes a label, an optional description, and a required-or-optional setting. A form needs at least one question, and every question needs a label.
Writing questions people answer
Numbers and scales beat prose for anything you want to track. "How was your week?" produces "fine" forever; "Rate your sleep out of 10" produces a series you can actually read.
Keep it short. Five questions answered every week beats fifteen answered twice. Mark only what you genuinely need as required. A form that will not submit because of a question the client cannot answer is a form they stop opening.
Use the description field on a question to define your terms. "Sleep quality" means different things to different people; one line of explanation makes the answers comparable.
The schedule
Turn scheduling on and pick weekly, monthly or quarterly, described as how often the clients you assign it to receive it again. Timing runs from each client's last submission rather than a fixed calendar date, and forms never stack up.
One thing you cannot undo
The unique name is permanent. It becomes the web address people use to open your form, takes letters, numbers and hyphens only, and cannot be changed once the form is created. Basecamp tells you this before you commit and again afterwards.
Choose it as carefully as a domain name. "weekly-check-in" will still make sense in two years; "form-2" will not. If the name you want is taken you are told.
Deleting a form
The confirmation is unambiguous: this deletes the form and all its responses, and it cannot be undone. Unlike deleting a folder, this one really does destroy data: every answer every client ever gave you. If a form has run its course, stop assigning it rather than deleting it.