Beacon's forms just keep getting better! Level up the experience for your form submitters by making sure they only see questions or details that are relevant to them with 'field and section visibility'.

Let's take a look at some use cases:

Enriching the details about the donations you receive:

Streamlining your application process:

You may have already grasped the general concept but essentially, you can configure your form fields and sections so that they only appear under certain conditions. This is all possible thanks to this, possibly familiar, button:

Clicking this button presents us with the opportunity to add conditions in a pop out like the following:

There's a couple of places you might see the 'Visibility conditions' button show up when setting up or editing a form.

The visibility conditions button will only appear when there are fields on the form that can be used as conditions for your new form section or field. The following field types are available to be used as conditions:

So let's take a look at what this looks like when we don't have have one of the above on our form and what happens when we add our 'Interests' field (dropdown list) to another section in the form.

In the clip above we see a section titled "Tell us more about your support" that is missing the 'Visibility conditions' button. 🤔 The video then shows the user adding a dropdown list field titled 'Interests' to the 'Your details' section of the form. Once this change is made, the 'Visibility conditions' button then appears on our earlier form section and we're now able to add some visibility conditions! 🎉

Notice that the only available field we can base our conditions on is that newly added 'Interests' field. This tells us that the only field on our form that is either a checkbox, rating, or dropdown field is the newly created 'Interests' field.

Let's chat through some other considerations to be aware of.

You may have noticed that in the previous example, our 'section visibility' was dependant on a field found in completely different section. It might not seem obvious initially but if you were to make a section's visibility dependent on a field held within that section, you'd quickly find yourself in a scenario where that section never appears on your form, or the section disappears as people are filling in questions on that section. As such there's some safeguards in place for what fields you can use as conditions:

Let's take a look at one of our uses cases from earlier:

If you wanted the visibility of your second question (a) to be dependant on your first question (1) then both of these questions would need to live in the same section like so:

It's not a person... It's just a bit of code

Let's take one of our use cases from earlier.

With 'Field and section' visibility on our forms, the above my look something like this:

Some pre-requisites before we dive in - only necessary if you want to follow this example exactly. You will need the following fields on the payments record type:

First things first, let's open up a new donation form, scroll down to our form sections card, click on 'Add section' and create a new 'General fields' section.

Let's give our section an appropriate title and make sure that the record type we're referencing fields from is set to Payment. From there, let's click 'Add item' and start inserting our questions

Each question will need to be a 'Form field' rather than a 'Form label' as we want people to be able to submit a response. From the dropdown list of fields available, let's start with our In memory? checkbox. We'll want to make our question a little more friendly and let's change the layout of the question from 'Checkbox' to 'Buttons' (This turns our checkbox into a Yes/No question and will come in handy later). Your set up should look something like this:

Finally hit 'Save form field'. This In memory? checkbox field is going to be the condition that our next few fields are based on 😃

Let's repeat steps and add another form field; This time let's select our In memory first name field. We'll end up with something like the above, but now we have access to our 'Visibility conditions' button.

Click on the 'Visibility conditions' button and let's set some criteria. We will be given the popup shown below where we'll click on 'Add condition'

We'll then follow the flow until we end up with something like this:

Hit 'Save' and then 'Save form field' until we're back to our form section. Let's repeat these steps with the extra fields we want to add until we end up with something like this:

Each form field above with the exception of our initial "Is this donation in mem..." checkbox should have the same 'Visibility conditions' applied; In memory? is checked.

Which means we now have a working form, in which if somebody selects "Yes" to our initial question of "Is your donation in memory of someone?", then they will be shown the following 3 fields to fill out and if not, they won't see anything.

Let's take it a step further and include a notes field for when somebody answers "No" to that initial question.

Follow the same steps for adding a new form field until you're here:

Then let's add the opposite condition to our previous fields:

Hit 'Save', 'Save form field', and then 'Save changes' to your form at the bottom of your page.

There's definitely some particular scenarios in which this feature really shines, particularly in Casework or Grantmaking organisations. However, don't be afraid to think outside the box and explore new ways this feature can work for you!

It's a feature that's definitely worth considering if your organisation uses forms to support any kind of application process. Whether that's for your Casework, Volunteering applications, Adoptions, or Grant applications.

Yes! A good example is when you might want to show somebody different funds they can support based on previous answers they've given.

The only thing to note here is that you cannot duplicate a field multiple times in the same section. You'll need to create a new form section and that section will need to have some visibility conditions set in order for you to duplicate the field

It's worth having a quick recap of our 'When is it?' and 'Why is it?' sections of this guide to make sure you're not missing the necessary elements. Usually, it will be because you don't have another field to base visibility on (Checkbox, drop-down list, rating).

Here's some other scenarios where it will not show up:

No, it's not possible to dynamically include text based on a person's responses. You will either need to keep the email generic or always include email variables that might not always be relevant. E.g. Include the name of the 'In memory' regardless of whether the donation was in memory of someone.

If you'd like to account for these scenarios here's some other options:

You can indeed! For example, you can populate the in memory name fields even while those fields are not yet visible. Try it here