Engage lets you build forms for supporters, volunteers and the people you support, then share a standalone link or embed the form on your website. Donation forms can take card and Direct Debit payments, and any form can ask for permission to stay in touch.

Start from what the form is for

New Form asks What is this form for? and offers nine starting points, from Blank form to Recruit regular givers and Update supporter details. Each one starts the form with suitable questions and settings, all of which you can change. See Form starting points.

Questions know where their answers go

You add questions from a catalogue, What do you need to know?: names, contact details, an address, an organisation, a message, a gift, or permission to contact the person. Each arrives already pointed at the right field on a contact, organisation or touchpoint, so there’s no separate mapping step. A question with nowhere to put its answer shows No home yet, and the form can’t be published until it has one.

The builder has five panes: Questions, Money, Permission, Style and After submission. A live preview beside them uses the same renderer as the published form.

What a response creates

Depending on the questions, a response can create or match a contact by email address, link an organisation, record an inbound Form Submission touchpoint, record a confirmed gift, and record consent decisions. After submission → What gets recorded summarises this for each form. Starting points don’t add other records: an event-booking form doesn’t create an Events booking, and a membership form doesn’t create a Memberships record.

The records are created in the background after the supporter sees the thank-you, so they can take a moment to appear. Submitted answers are always kept and can be reviewed in Submissions.

Payments and gift handles

Card gifts go through Stripe and regular Direct Debit gifts through GoCardless, both connected by your administrator. Gift handles show what each amount achieves, such as “£5 pays for a day’s meals for a family”, and are kept in a library you reuse across forms. See Take card and Direct Debit payments on a form and Show what a gift achieves with gift handles.

Permission is recorded either way

A permission request records a decision against your own consent purposes and the channels you choose. A ticked box records yes, and an unticked box records no, which can replace an existing supporter’s earlier answer. See Ask for permission to contact supporters.

Draft, publish, and share

Status	Meaning
draft	Saved work that isn’t publicly available
live	Published and accepting responses. Saved edits wait until you publish them
archived	Offline for good, with existing submissions kept

Saving and publishing are separate. Before publishing, checks stop a form going live if it couldn’t work, for example if it takes a gift but Stripe can’t take charges yet. A published form has an iframe snippet and a standalone link; see Embed or share a form.

Who can do what

Task	Permission
Open forms and gift handles, and see embed codes	engage:read:forms
Create, edit, publish and archive forms, and manage gift handles	engage:write:forms (with engage:read:forms)
Read submissions	engage:read:submissions
Connect or disconnect Stripe	account:admin:team

Start with Build and publish a form.