Oct 25, 2024 
Every business needs intake forms, from onboarding new clients to capturing medical history, a well-designed intake form sets you up with all the relevant information to start a wonderful new relationship with a customer or a client. Today, forms are mostly online; there are lots of great digital online form builder solutions that help you make intake forms in minutes.
Ofcourse, the one we’ve all grown up with is Google Forms. Today we’re going to discuss how to create an Intake Form in Google Forms. Google Forms offers a simple, accessible way to create and manage forms.
What Makes An Intake Form Effective – A Quick Checklist
An effective intake form goes beyond just collecting basic information. To ensure your form achieves its purpose, it needs to gather relevant information in a structured and user-friendly manner. Before you start making your intake form on Google, here is a quick checklist of the key elements that contribute to an efficient intake form:
- Clear and Concise Questions: The form should ask for only the most essential information, such as personal details, medical history, or company name, depending on its purpose. Keeping the questions straightforward helps reduce confusion and improves response rates.
- Customizable Form Fields: Offering various question types, such as multiple choice, dropdown menus, and short answer fields, allows you to tailor the form to the type of data you need to collect.
Mobile Friendly Design: With more people accessing forms on their phones, ensuring that your intake form is mobile friendly is critical. - Customization Options: Customize your forms to align it to your brand. It makes your form appear credible, professional, and appealing.
- Advanced Features: Leveraging more advanced features like conditional logic or file uploads ensures the form can collect more complex data when needed.
- Integration: Storing form responses directly in Google Drive or linking the form to Google Sheets helps you manage and analyze data efficiently. This integration is particularly useful for tracking form submissions and organizing the information in real-time.
Google Forms for your Intake Form
Based on what is needed to make an effective Intake Form, yes, Google Forms does match many of the requirements. You can consider it for client intake forms or onboarding new customers.
- You can collect responses in real-time
- Google Forms has basic customization options for font style, survey colors, and themes
- It also has the ability to collect files, ask multiple choice or short answer questions
- It offers a reasonably good mobile friendly interface.
- It is flexible, free, and an accessible tool
Now lets go through a step-by-step process of creating your own intake form using Google Forms. Let’s explore how to easily create a Google intake form.
Steps to Create a Google Intake Form in Google Forms
1. Navigate to Google Forms
Open your browser and go to Google Forms. Click the plus sign in the top left corner to start a new form. This will open a blank form.
2. Title Your Form
In the Untitled form field, add the name of your intake form. For example, you can call it “New Client Intake Form” or “Patient Intake Form.”
Add a Description
Below the title, you’ll find a space to add a brief description. This is where you provide context or instructions. For instance, you could add, “Please fill out this form with your personal details and relevant intake information.”
Add Questions
Click the Untitled Question box and start by typing a question. Choose the type of answer field by clicking the dropdown menu on the right. You can choose from:
- Short answer for names or basic information
- Multiple choice for selecting options like preferred contact method
- Dropdown menu for more structured options like service preferences
For example, you can ask: “What is your company name?” or “What is your preferred method of contact?”
5. Customize Your Form
To add more questions, click the plus sign in the vertical menu on the right. You can also change the form fields by selecting different question types or adding answer options. If you want to make your form more engaging, click the palette icon in the top right corner to modify colors and font styles. This helps you brand your form to match your business.
6. Send or Embed the Form
Once you’ve added all the relevant information and questions, click the Send button in the top right corner. You can send your Google intake form via email, share a link, or embed it directly into your website.
7. Integration with Google Sheets
For easier data management, integrate your form with Google Sheets. This allows you to organize and analyze the data collected from your form in real-time.
Customize Your Google Intake Form for Specific Use Cases
Google intake forms can be customized for various purposes, but it’s not without it’s limitations especially if you need your forms to be industry specific:
- Client intake forms: Yes Google Forms is a simple and effective tool for collecting basic client details, but it lacks advanced conditional logic. The form only supports section-wise redirection, meaning you can direct respondents to different sections based on their answers, but it doesn’t offer question-level logic or the ability to create AND/OR conditions for more complex workflows. This means you many not be able to collect very detailed – yet relevant information in the first go.
- Medical forms: While Google Intake Forms can be used to fill out patient intake forms, it is not HIPAA compliant by default. To meet HIPAA requirements, you must:
- Sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with Google.
- Subscribe to an appropriate Google Workspace or Cloud Identity package.
- Configure the service settings to comply with HIPAA’s Security Rule.
- Train your workforce on how to use Google Forms in a HIPAA-compliant manner.
Without these steps, Google Forms is not suitable for handling sensitive medical information such as medical history.
- Online intake forms: Google Intake Forms can help onboard new clients efficiently in a digital setting. However, its customization options are somewhat limited compared to other form builders. For instance, the file upload feature is only available to users with a Google account, meaning they must be signed in to upload files.
Google Intake Form: Verdict
An intake form built in Google Forms provides an excellent way to streamline client onboarding. This tool is a good fit to simply collect basic information efficiently but it may not be the best for gathering patient intake forms or client intake forms that require advanced conditional logic or more robust analytics. But as a flexible and free platform, Google Forms is good enough to make easy to create and easy to fill intake forms.
Google Forms Not Ticking The Boxes For You?
You need a better intake form? That’s alright, check out MakeForms. It offers a powerful alternative to traditional form builders like Google Forms, with advanced capabilities that set it apart. It features advanced logic, allowing users to create forms with question-level conditions and AND/OR logic.
It is also HIPAA-compliant, along with adhering to many other industry standards like GDPR, PIPEDA, and more making it ideal for handling sensitive data like medical information and other types of PHI. One of its standout features is its AI-powered interface, which understands your needs and can generate a customized form for you in seconds. And it also comes with a vast library of templates, saving you time in form creation.
MakeForms excels in business intelligence, offering phenomenal analytics tools that make it easy to track, visualize, and analyze data efficiently.
Start today and experience how easy it is to create an intake form that will streamline your business and help you collect all the information you need to onboard clients or customers.
FAQs: How To Create A Google Intake Form In Google Forms
Google Forms is a great option for creating simple intake forms, especially if you’re looking for a free and accessible tool to collect basic client or customer information. It’s easy to use and integrates seamlessly with Google Sheets and Google Drive for organizing and analyzing responses. However, if your intake process requires advanced features like question-level conditional logic, HIPAA compliance, or more robust customization and analytics, you may want to explore other form builders with more powerful capabilities.
To create an intake form in Google Forms, open the platform, title your form, add questions using the available options (like short answer or multiple choice), customize it with the palette icon, and then click Send to share or embed it. You can also integrate responses with Google Sheets for easier data management.
