Intake Form Design
I have stopped working with people over their intake forms. I have made decisions not to start working with people at all over their intake forms. I’ve also encountered intake forms that I love, that built trust with the professional and helped me to learn more about myself. I think they can be a beautiful tool - and they seem to be treated as a generic afterthought way more often than I’d like.
So! Here’s my thoughts about designing an awesome intake form:
Step 1: Why are you having an intake form at all?
Really, stop to ask yourself this question and answer it meaningfully. And please don’t answer '“because everyone else is doing it.” Is it because you don’t have time to have a 30 minute conversation with everyone interested? Because you need a standardized set of information for whatever you’re offering? Because the people you like working with don’t want to start with a synchronous conversation? Because there’s some inherent value in filling out the form? Some other reason?
At least for coaching, as far as I know, there’s no firm requirement that an intake form must exist. It’s important to me that:
Everything I put effort into in my business either has a good reason or entertains me
Everything I ask my clients to do is justified, in ways that I can explain to them if asked, and ideally that are clear without explanation.
My reasons for having an intake form (which are, obviously, not universal) are:
At least some of the people I want to work with are much more comfortable writing about thoughtful, introspective things than speaking about them and my intake form offers an opportunity to provide me with important information in a way that’s comfortable for those clients.
It’s important to me to customize what I’m offering to meet the unique needs of the person I’m working with. It’s easier for me to do that when I have more information about what they need, and having it up-front gives me time to think through possible options ahead of a synchronous discussion call.
It provides an early indication about whether someone’s a great fit to work with me or whether I should help direct them toward other options, before either one of us has invested a ton of time and energy determining that it’s a bad fit.
Step 2: What do you need from an intake form?
This is going to be informed by why you’re having one at all. If it’s to screen clients, this step includes thinking through which clients you’d be delighted to have in your business and what would indicate that someone isn’t a good fit for you. If it’s because you need to have standardized information, it means asking yourself what information you really need, and why you need it.
Essentially, this step is building a set of clear requirements from your perspective for what the intake form needs to accomplish, and a solid understanding of why each of those requirements are important.
Step 3: How do you want to come across to your potential clients?
This is going to depend, greatly, on who your clients are and what they’re looking for. You know the people you want to work with better than I do, but keep in mind that this is not a one-sided exercise. Your intake form is one of the early interactions that someone has with you - and they’re gathering information about you here just as much as you’re gathering information about them.
I want to come across as curious, flexible, and supportive. I want to give the impression that we’re building a relationship together, that works for both of us, and it’s important to me to get their input on how it will work best. I want my clients to feel a spacious sense of being seen and heard and their thoughts and experience being welcome and valued. And I want it to feel like an invitation, rather than a demand.
Step 4: Figure out how to do all the things in steps 2 and 3!
Yeah, I know this is a little bit like the “draw an owl” meme. The specifics are going to look wildly different, though, depending on how you’ve answered steps 1-3. Some things that I’ve found important to consider include:
How much explanation do I offer about what’s important about the form in general, each individual question, and/or how people should engage if they’re struggling with an answer?
Do I have multiple choice answers or open-ended questions?
Which questions are required to answer and which ones are optional?
How can I get more than one piece of information that I want from the questions I’m asking? How can I streamline the form as much as possible?
Which of my requirements are easiest to accomplish through asking direct questions, and which ones are better served by a more indirect approach?
Step 5: Consider the barriers the intake form creates for your potential clients.
Congratulations! You have a rough draft of an intake form, that feels awesome to you and like it does all the things that you specifically want. That’s awesome.
If you look at it through a client’s eyes, what’s hard about it? What gets in the way of completing it? Are those barriers that you want to put in front of someone contacting you? If not, what can you do to lower the barriers?
In particular, try asking questions like:
Does the person filling this out actually know what all of these words mean?
Is this overwhelming to look at, before even starting to look at specific questions?
Is it clear, upfront, what the time and energy commitment is to fill this out?
Is the person filling this out confident in the “right” answers to these questions?
In particular, if you’re asking about their experience, or how many times in the last <timeframe> a thing has happened - are you talking to people who trust themselves? Who have solid memories about that sort of thing? Who actually believe they have a clear sense of time and what’s going on?
Does the person filling this out have the knowledge, skill, time, and executive function to complete these tasks and answer these questions?
How afraid is the person filling this out likely to be about “getting it wrong”?
Step 6: Are there ways to add value to the experience of filling out the form, itself?
This is going to depend, somewhat, on what value you want to add to your clients’ lives. But is there a way that you can make the act of filling out the form inherently valuable for the client, whether or not you end up working together?
As a coach, some of what I try to include here are questions that potentially benefit the client to introspect on, whether or not it goes any further. I currently ask, at the end of my intake form, what the client has learned from filling it out and what they want to do about it - mostly as a way to invite them to consider the value they’ve gotten in the course of filling out the form.
Step 7: Get feedback and iterate!
Share the form with people you know who are in the groups you’d love to work with and explicitly ask them for feedback. Start using the form, and invite your clients to give you feedback about their experience of filling out the form, as it’s reasonable to do so. Pay attention if you’re getting questions or confusion about the form, or if there are particular questions that people are consistently not answering, or that they’re answering in ways that don’t give you the information you want, or that they answered in ways that resulted in you assuming things that you find out later aren’t exactly what’s happening.
Revisit your goals from steps 1-3 periodically. Are those still the goals you have for the form? Is this intake form (still) achieving them? How might it better achieve those goals? What have you learned since last time you revised it that could help make the intake form even better?
Everything we do is a constant work in progress, and there’s space to make an imperfect draft and learn and grow and improve.
I hope this was helpful, and if you’re trying to design an intake form and finding something here confusing, I’d love to talk through it together (though I have no official qualifications or expertise in intake form design, and in particular not in intake form design for anything that has legal requirements). Feel free to comment here or send me a message.
