The client intake process requires caseworkers to consider and remember extensive information about clients’ personal details as well as their unique needs and preferences. A comprehensive nonprofit intake form streamlines this process by establishing a consistent, standardized data system tailored to the needs of your staff and clients.
Beyond collecting client information, nonprofit consulting intake forms support many aspects of nonprofit operations, from downstream services and client experiences to reporting and grant compliance. Explore our intake form best practices to elevate client and staff experiences for your nonprofit.
What Is a Nonprofit Intake Form?
A nonprofit intake form collects key individual and household details for new clients, such as needs, preferences, and contact information, ensuring you document everything required in your first conversation. It sets the foundation for services, eligibility, and referrals when working with new clients.
Establishing a clear paper trail with nonprofit client intake forms gives you legal and grant compliance from the start. Comprehensive and consistent intake forms also support general documentation and case planning, letting case managers easily access clients’ information without missing any key details.
What Should Be Included in a Nonprofit Intake Form?
Although you should customize your intake forms to meet your nonprofit’s unique needs, most forms follow similar templates that include the same basic information. These essential details support compliance, equity, and general documentation.
Nonprofit intake form templates should cover the following information:
- Personal and demographic information: These boxes cover basic client details, including their full name, date of birth, gender identity, contact information, income, and employment details.
- Consent and privacy disclosures: These sections inform clients about exactly what type of information your nonprofit is collecting and what it will be used for. This ensures compliance and reassures clients that their data will be handled safely.
- Eligibility criteria and verification: Use these spaces to collect information related to your services’ unique eligibility requirements. For example, nonprofit intake forms may request information about the client’s housing, immigration, or college enrollment status, depending on the nonprofit’s mission and services.
- Initial needs assessment: This section focuses on the client or household’s specific needs that you aim to address with your services. Consider their goals, preferences, service history, background information, and current barriers.
- Emergency contacts and support networks: Beyond knowing who you should contact during emergencies, your nonprofit should also identify who your client has to support them in times of need, such as family, friends, and support groups. This information can help you establish more holistic care during times of crisis.
Map Intake to Your Services
A key aspect of intake is understanding the client or household’s unique needs so you can confidently direct them to the most appropriate services or solutions. Of course, this part of the client intake process looks different for every nonprofit, client type, and referral source.
For example, a mutual aid phone line may use a series of quick questions to identify clients’ immediate needs. Meanwhile, an immigration social work organization may record extensive personal information, such as clients’ employment status and background, to determine their most significant obstacles and their eligibility for certain services.
Collecting more information with comprehensive nonprofit intake forms maximizes insight and pinpoints your best possible solutions. For instance, by understanding a household’s income, employment history, and cultural background, you can narrow down the best price ranges, types of homes, and neighborhoods for a housing case. Likewise, learning about a child’s interests and hobbies lets you customize your youth case management strategy based on their unique needs.
Design Forms With Staff and Clients in Mind
Consider the unique needs of your staff, clients, industry, and location as you develop ideas for your nonprofit intake form. This lets you easily collect all relevant client information without overlooking key details such as household language barriers.
Beyond the specific details, you should also customize your form’s layout. A strategic design can highlight the most critical case information for each case and make the documents easier to review later on.
Step 1: Involve Frontline Caseworkers
From the start, talk to your frontline caseworkers about the information they collect and the best ways to organize it on the page. Find out if anyone regularly asks any questions or requests data that isn’t on your current forms. Likewise, ask your caseworkers if there are any sections or spaces on the form that they rarely use or don’t think are as important.
Additionally, consider caseworkers’ intake processes, including which questions they ask first. Structuring your nonprofit intake form around your team’s intake flow helps prevent caseworkers or clients from having to jump around the page, letting them give each question their full attention in turn.
Step 2: Use Conditional Fields
Conditional fields designate questions and boxes that only need to be filled based on the client’s previous answer. For example, you could follow up the question “Is the client currently enrolled in college?” with the conditional question, “If so, which college?” Conditional fields could also only relate to certain use cases, such as for tribal programs or health cases.
Conditional fields speed up and simplify intake by letting clients easily skip irrelevant sections. They can also save your team the hassle of working with multiple types of intake forms if certain cases only need slightly different types of information.
Step 3: Consider Multilingual Accessibility
Offering digital intake forms in multiple languages improves accessibility and limits the risks of misinterpretations and other errors. Clients can fill out forms in their preferred language, ensuring they fully understand each question. With appropriate case management software, your team can then transfer and translate the information back to the English intake form for easy access.
Connect Intake to the Full Client Journey
Client intake is one step of a much larger process, but this first step is vitally important. Treat it as the initial workflow of the client’s care plan, even if you don’t know what the rest of the plan looks like yet.
During your nonprofit’s client onboarding, take time to focus on the client’s assessment and outcomes, including on your intake form wherever possible. This provides clients with immediate answers and confidence in their upcoming treatment plan. It also gives clients an opportunity to address potential concerns, such as services or outcomes they don’t feel comfortable with.
What’s the Difference Between Paper and Digital Intake Forms?
Clients must physically complete and submit paper nonprofit intake forms to your organization. Digital forms let clients fill in their information from their phone, computer, or tablet on their own time.
While some clients may still prefer the old pen-and-paper method, more nonprofits are making the most of digital intake forms’ benefits, such as accessibility, time savings, and data accuracy.
The key differences between paper and digital intake forms for nonprofits include:
- Manual entry: Paper intake forms require caseworkers to manually enter clients’ answers into their databases, increasing the risk of typos, duplication, and other errors. Modern case management software automatically adds completed digital intake forms to clients’ cases and accounts.
- Storage and security: Case management software automatically collects completed intake forms and notifies caseworkers about updates, which is significantly faster than physically collecting paper forms — especially if clients need to take the forms home to complete them. Additionally, rather than filling the office with filing cabinets, you can conveniently and safely store digital documents using software with strong cybersecurity measures.
- Auto-validation: Most digital intake form tools automatically check and validate completed intake forms, letting clients correct mistakes before they submit them to your nonprofit.
- Integration: Digital intake forms can integrate with case management systems and other nonprofit workflow tools, streamlining administrative processes and improving your team’s access to information.
How Nonprofit Intake Forms Support Grant Compliance
Beyond case-by-case usage, nonprofit client intake forms support your data reporting and outcome tracking processes. This standardized data lets you produce consistent metrics and link demographic data to your program impacts.
Outcome tracking is especially beneficial for grant compliance, as it demonstrates that your nonprofit is achieving both its own objectives and those of the grant. Such streamlined information can significantly reduce friction during audits and funder communications, allowing all parties to easily access relevant details.
Effective nonprofit data management also differentiates your organization from competitors by letting you pinpoint your greatest real-world impacts and organizational strengths.
Improve Internal Coordination
On an internal level, nonprofit intake forms support efficient nonprofit processes by minimizing administrative work, improving communication, and limiting errors. Caseworkers can securely share intake data across teams while limiting who has access to private information. Digital forms also reduce rework and support continuity of care during collaborations, ensuring new caseworkers can access previous forms and background information.
Nonprofits can take steps to ensure data security and privacy with intake forms. Collaborative case management tools safely secure forms within their digital databases. Robust cybersecurity, granular permissions, and role-based permissions further protect this digital data, limiting who can actually access clients’ personally identifiable information (PII).
Streamlining the Intake Process: Where Technology Comes In
Nonprofit technology solutions like Casebook can elevate your client intake process and the client experience. The top benefits of automating nonprofit intake forms include:
- Reduced burden on caseworkers and staff
- Pre-fill capabilities for repeat clients
- Mobile-friendly forms for outreach teams
- Instant data syncing into case files
- Real-time notifications about case updates
- Built-in compliance and audit trails
How Casebook Simplifies Nonprofit Intake Without Sacrificing Flexibility
The right digital forms and tools streamline nonprofit intake, reduce errors, and set clients up for success. With Casebook’s case management software, you can configure your forms and your workflow to your organization’s unique needs within a nonprofit-first design. Other key advantages include:
- Creating intake forms without coding
- Automatically logging responses to client profiles
- Connecting intake to referrals, services, and case notes
- Using built-in permissions for secure data
Make your own nonprofit intake form: Book a demo today.