Using FormAssembly to Collate User Votes

With its simple drag-and-drop form builder, multiple question options, and seamless Salesforce integration, FormAssembly is one of the most popular web form apps in our toolbox. Not only can it be used for membership sign-up forms, donation forms, and event registration forms, but it’s highly extensible and, with a little creativity, can be used to fulfill myriad requirements. In this post, we will look at how The Genesis Prize Foundation used a simple, but powerful, FormAssembly form as a part of its efforts to achieve annual voting goals.

The Genesis Prize is an annual prize awarded to individuals who have achieved significant professional success, in recognition of their accomplishments and commitment to Jewish values. The Genesis Prize Foundation is the organization behind this award and conducts the nomination and voting process annually. To manage the vote in 2020, Genesis Prize opted to use Salesforce as its source of data storage and to embed a FormAssembly form as one of the voting platforms. By setting up an “After form submitted” connector in FormAssembly, the form sent voting results to a Custom Object in Salesforce.

The experience for the voters is effortless, too. The user simply navigates to the website landing page with the embedded form and selects their chosen laureate by clicking a button. After passing reCAPTCHA, agreeing to terms and conditions, and submitting their vote, the user is redirected to the website’s voting homepage.

Below we explain how we configured the form, integrated it with a Custom Object in Salesforce, and embedded it on the public website page.

Step 1. Create the Form in FormAssembly

Creating the voting form in FormAssembly is very straightforward. In this case, there were only two questions that needed to be added.

  1. Which Laureate deserves the Prize?
  2. Voter’s email address
Using Form Assembly for The Genesis Prize

Step 2: Configure the Salesforce Connector and Turn On reCAPTCHA

To manage voting results, we built a Custom Object in Salesforce to host all the voting data submitted via FormAssembly. To integrate with Salesforce, we configured a Salesforce connector in the “After Form submitted” section of the form. Immediately following submission, the user is redirected to the homepage while the result of their vote is written to the Custom Object in Salesforce.

As this is a voting form published on a public website, it was important to protect the form from fraud and abuse from bots and other automated attacks by turning on reCAPTCHA on the form’s Processing page in FormAssembly.

Using FormAssembly to collate votes for Genesis Prize Foundation

Step 3. Embed the Form’s HTML on the Voting Landing Page

FormAssembly provides multiple ways to publish your form, including FormAssembly hosted form, embed HTML, iframe, server side script (API,) or WordPress plugin. In order to achieve the particular look and feel The Genesis Prize Foundation desired, we selected embed HTML as the chosen method. This method of publishing allows you to retrieve the raw HTML snippet or the full code for the entire page and also works with the reCAPTCHA functionality. With a little HTML and CSS customization, the final version of the form published on the website looked like this:

The Genesis Prize

Have you used FormAssembly in unique and creative ways? Do you have a requirement to collect information using a web form and send results to Salesforce? Contact Fíonta to learn more about how we can help.