Registration & requests
Contact form
Five fields that turn a scattered inbox into one queue somebody owns.
Why this survey gets sent
“Messages reach us on the phone, on the page, on two different email addresses, and on whoever answered last. Nobody can tell me how many arrived this week, never mind how many we answered.”
A published email address is a queue with no owner, no order and no count. The same five fields collected on one page give you a list you can sort, a subject you can route on, and a number at the end of the month — without asking the sender for anything they would not have written anyway.
What is in it
- Your name (required)
- Email address (required)
- Phone number (optional)
- What is your message about? (a short list)
- Your message (long answer, required)
About 3 min to answer
Contact form
About 3 min
How to write this survey
Ask for the least that lets you reply
A contact page is not a place to build a database. Every extra field raises the number of people who close the tab, and the fields collected “because they might be useful later” sit empty in the reports for years. Ask for the name, an email address, the subject and the message itself, and stop there.
The phone number is the one field worth arguing about, and the answer is to keep it optional. Whoever wants a call will leave it; whoever prefers to write will not abandon the page over it. City, employer and “how did you hear about us?” can wait until after the first reply, when there is a visible reason to ask.
The subject list is the whole design
The one field that changes how you work is “what is your message about?”. Write its options with the names of the teams that will pick the message up, not the names of departments on an org chart: general enquiry, programmes and activities, partnership, complaint. Five options is plenty; a sixth usually means two of them say the same thing.
Leave a last option called “something else”. Without it people pick the nearest wrong answer, and the complaint lands with the partnerships team and waits a week. Then revisit the list every few months: an option nobody picks should go, and a subject that keeps appearing inside “something else” has earned an option of its own.
One box for the message
Make the message box large and required, and do not split it into “subject” and “details”. The sender already knows what they want to say, and splitting it makes them write a truncated headline and then repeat it underneath. A wide box says an explanation is welcome; a narrow one says the opposite, and people write to it accordingly.
If you genuinely need one specific detail — an order number, the date of a visit, the name of a product — give it a field of its own instead of writing “please include your order number” in the instructions. Instructions are read about half the time; a separate field arrives tidy, searchable, and in the same place on every message.
Say what happens after send
The thing that makes people send the same message three times is silence. Put the reply time you actually keep on the thank-you screen — “we reply within two working days” — and do not promise an immediate answer if nobody reads the queue in the evening. A modest promise that holds is worth more than a generous one that does not.
If there is a faster channel for something urgent, name it above the fields rather than on another page: an emergency number, or the hours you are open. Both sides are saved a message that will not be read in time, and the people who need the page most are the ones least likely to go looking for a second one.
Handle the junk without punishing the honest
The first instinct against automated junk is to add fields and puzzles, and those punish the honest visitor long before they inconvenience a script. Keep the page short and filter after arrival instead: the subject list alone exposes most automated messages, because a script picks the first option every time and a person rarely does.
And do not print your email address as text beside the page. A published address is harvested within days, and the problem moves from a page you control — where you can change a field, close a subject or add a note — into an inbox where you control nothing at all.