Help with large numbers of forms....your solutions and recommendations are apprecaited!

[Matt_Galassini]

I have a large number of forms on my website that are used to collect information from people who are looking to engage in specific programs.

They collect pretty general demographic information, however they do have some other fields that can in some cases have multiple values.  I.e. my vendor number for one partner is 1234, and my vendor number is 5678 for another.  Due to that, the fields will overwrite data overtime so pulling historical data on those forms fills could result in different information in that field than there was on the date of submission.

Since I have over 100 forms, building unique fields for each form would be extremely difficult to manage and result in a huge number of custom fields in our instance.

Reporting is also extremely cumbersome and was able to in the meanwhile develop some smart list subscriptions that allow you to just see the relevant fields to that particular form.

I need to decide on where to migrate these forms to, and have been looking at Survey Monkey and 123 Forms, both of which have Marketo integration.

Has anyone used either one of these solutions, or are using Marketo forms in a large volume like we are and have had success?

Appreciate any help you can provide!

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

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They collect pretty general demographic information, however they do have some other fields that can in some cases have multiple values.  I.e. my vendor number for one partner is 1234, and my vendor number is 5678 for another.  Due to that, the fields will overwrite data overtime so pulling historical data on those forms fills could result in different information in that field than there was on the date of submission.

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You should be using Program Member Custom Fields for this! PMCFs have different values in every Program in which they appear. So you'd add the PMCF to the form, and the values are set in the Program holding the form — in this case, you do need Program-local forms. (In the general case, you want as few global forms as possible, but that's not possible with PMCFs.)

As far as other 3rd-party platforms you'll find that at absolute best they create Marketo Custom Objects for every form submission, which are impossible to report on in the way you expect (within the Marketo UI). You could write a pretty simple service to do the same thing with Marketo forms, too, but ending up with COs is a mixed result. PMCFs are better.

[Katja_Keesom]

Totally agree. The only change you'd need to make is in your reporting, as currently the PMCF fields cannot be included in a smart list view. If you want to include the values of these fields in an overview, you would need to go through the Members tab overview to achieve that.

I know this has been identified as an issue, but not sure when this will change.