Collect and update info with information forms

An information collection form is a short questionnaire you send to people who are already in MarkTrack — your current parents, students, and teachers — to collect or refresh details you keep about them. Think emergency contacts, allergies and medications, a new phone number, or an address change. Each recipient gets a private link by email, opens a clean web form, and submits their answers. You watch who has finished and who hasn't, all from one page.

This is a different tool from an enrollment form. Enrollment forms are for new applicants — people who don't have an account yet and are applying to join. Information collection forms are for the families and staff who are already enrolled. Because the system already knows who each recipient is, it can do two things an enrollment form can't: pre-fill the form with what's already on file, and write the answers back onto the person's profile when they submit — so a parent updating their phone number actually updates their record, not just a pile of survey results you'd have to re-type.

Step 1 — Open Information Collection Forms

1. Go to the Enrollments area for your school and open Information Collection Forms.
2. You'll see three counters at the top — Active, Draft, and Closed — and a list of every form you've built.
3. Each row shows the form's title, a "completed / sent" count, the number of fields, and a status pill.

Step 2 — Start a new form from a template (or blank)

1. Click New Form. A Choose a template window opens.
2. Pick a ready-made starting point, or pick Blank to start from scratch.

The built-in templates already include the right fields — and where it makes sense, they're already wired to update the person's record:

• Contact Update — phone and home address (both write back to the record).
• Emergency Contact — name, phone, and relationship of an emergency contact (stored as answers only).
• Medical Info — allergies, medications, doctor, and insurance (stored as answers only).
• Transportation — pickup address (writes back), authorized pickup people, and pickup method.
• Communication Preferences — preferred language and contact method.
• Blank Survey — three empty fields you fill in yourself.

Step 3 — Build the form

The builder shows a live preview of exactly what recipients will see. Give the form a Form Title (required) and an optional Description that explains what you need and why. Then add your questions from the floating toolbar at the bottom of the screen.

1. Click a field type in the toolbar to add it: Text (short answer), Paragraph (long answer), Phone, Date, or Choice (a dropdown).
2. Hover a field and click the pencil icon to edit it; click the trash icon to remove it.
3. In the edit panel, set the Label (the question text), the Type, an optional Placeholder, and toggle Required on if the answer is mandatory.
4. For a Choice field, type each option on its own line in the Options box.

The "Updates User Field" dropdown — write answers back to the record

This is the feature that makes information forms more than a survey. In each field's edit panel there's a dropdown labelled Updates User Field (optional). Leave it on "— custom question, stored in response —" and the answer is simply saved with the submission (perfect for emergency contacts, allergies, anything you just want recorded). Choose a profile field instead, and when the person submits, their answer is written straight onto their MarkTrack record.

Only a fixed, safety-checked list of profile fields can be written back:

• Name
• Phone
• Dob (date of birth)
• Gender
• Grade
• Address and the structured parts: Street address, City, State, Zip code

Step 4 — Save as draft or save & activate

1. Click Save as Draft to keep working on it later — a draft is not sendable yet.
2. Click Save & Activate to mark the form Active so you can send invitations.

You can come back and Edit a form at any time. On a form's page you'll also see Close (which stops it accepting any new submissions) and, on a closed form, Reopen. A form must be active for recipients to submit — if you close it, existing links stop accepting answers.

Step 5 — Send invitations to an audience

Open the form and use the green Send to panel. Tick the audiences who should receive a link, then click Send Invitations.

1. Choose any of Parents, Students, Teachers, and Admins. Parents and Students are ticked by default.
2. Click Send Invitations. MarkTrack creates one submission per recipient and emails each person their own secure link.
3. If the form is still a draft, sending automatically activates it first.

Step 6 — What the recipient sees

Each link points at a public page (no login needed — the secret token in the link is the credential). The recipient sees your form title and description, a badge naming whose information it's about, and the questions.

• Any field you mapped to a profile attribute arrives pre-filled with what's currently on file — so the person just confirms or corrects it rather than typing from scratch.
• When a parent fills out a child's form, the page shows it's about the child, "filling out as" the parent.
• Required fields are enforced on submit; the person can't finish until every required answer is filled.

Step 7 — What happens on submit

When the recipient clicks Submit, MarkTrack saves all their answers to the submission and, for every mapped field, writes the new value onto the right person's record (the child's record when a parent filled it out, otherwise the recipient's own). It records exactly what changed — old value to new value — so there's an audit trail. After that, the link becomes read-only: reopening it shows their submitted answers but they can't change them.

Step 8 — Track who's done, and resend

The form's page is your tracking dashboard. Four cards show Sent, Completed, Pending, and a Completion percentage. Below them, the Recipients table lists every person with a status pill — Completed, Pending, or Expired — the dates invited and submitted, and a copyable link.

1. Click a row to open that person's submission and see the answers they gave.
2. Use the copy button on the Link column to grab someone's link (handy if you need to text it to a family that didn't get the email).
3. Click Resend on a row to email a fresh link. This invalidates the old pending link and creates a new submission, so the previous link stops working.

See everything one person has filled out

The Submissions by user button on the main list lets you search any person by name or email and see every information form they've ever completed across your school — useful when a family asks "what did we already send you?"

Information forms vs. enrollment forms — a quick reminder

• Use an enrollment form when you're collecting applications from new families who don't have accounts yet.
• Use an information collection form when you need to gather or refresh details from people who are already in MarkTrack — and especially when you want their answers to update their records automatically.

That's the whole loop: build a form, optionally map fields to records, send links to the right audience, and watch completions roll in. If a recipient is stuck on an expired or invalid link, resend them a new one, or reach out to us through the contact page.