Using Marketo forms to accept applications

[Anonymous]

Hello Community,

Our company runs an annual charitable program where our clients complete a lengthy online application form to apply for this gift-matching program. The application form includes a few drop-down fields that rely on conditional responses, as well as entering multiple desired recipients of the donation. We're exploring the possibility of turning that application form into a Marketo form but I don't believe that Marketo is currently capable of managing this.

Has anyone used a Marketo form in this capacity? It would be helpful to hear success stories, if any!

Thanks,
Caryl 

[Anonymous]

For lengthy survey-type projects, I've found Marketo to be quite limited. Instead, a dedicated survey tool can be handy. Some will connect with your CRM too, so can often accomplish a similar end result as a Marketo form could. 

If you really want to use Marketo for this, it's probably possible, but could be painful and tricky to administrate. 

[Anonymous]

As Jeff said, you could do this with Marketo, but I doubt you'd want to. You'd need to create custom fields for each response at the Lead and Contact or at the Account level, then create a form mapping the form values to these custom SFDC values. If the survey doesn't change year-on-year and you could use this annually, then this may not be a bad thing, however if the questions change year on year, you'd constantly be editing, adding, deleting custom fields. It really depends on whether you want to deal with that many custom fields in SFDC and what your layout schema looks like.

For any kind of lengthy survey we've been using SurveyMonkey, which is also something that SFDC and other large organizations use. I highly reccomend it. Flexible, easy-to-use, and affordable.

[Anonymous]

Both answers from Jeff and Tom just validated my doubts about going down this path. One thing I try to avoid at all costs is to introduce junk data, ones that may be useful for business processes but not necessarily helpful in building a strong lead database. I'll go with my original hunch of not using a Marketo form for this purpose. 

Thanks for your input! 

Caryl