Forms

A form is a conversation your page holds with the people who follow it. A casting call, a guestlist request, a residency application, a survey the morning after the night. You write the questions in Backstage; they are answered at sway.events/f/your-address, one screen at a time.

One question per screen is the point, not decoration. A form that asks twelve things on one page asks for twelve decisions at once, and people close it. The same questions split across screens carry one decision each, and far more people reach the end.

Four kinds of page carry forms: promoter, artist, venue and crew.

Open your forms

1. Open Backstage, then click the page.
2. Click Forms under Marketing in the left sidebar. On a crew it sits under Content.

You land on the library: every form this page holds, newest edit first, with three numbers beside each one.

The three numbers

Every form is measured on three different things, and mixing any two of them gives a figure that means nothing.

The completion rate divides Sent by Started, never by Seen. Dividing by views instead produces a percentage that falls every time you share the link, which reads as the form getting worse while it is getting more traffic.

Create a form

1. Click New form at the top right of the library.
2. Give it a name. The public address is derived from it as you type, and you can change the address afterwards.
3. Pick a starting point. Four are offered: Blank, Casting call, Guestlist request and After the night. A template is a set of questions already written, and the first edit dissolves it.
4. Pick a colour. It paints the progress bar, the selected answers and the glow behind the page.
5. Click Create the form.

You land straight in the builder, on a draft. A draft has a public address already, but the address answers not found until you publish: a link shared too early should look like a typo, not like a preview.

Build the questions

The Questions tab is three columns: the steps on the left, the selected step in the middle, and a live preview on the right.

Steps

A step is one screen. It carries a title, an optional line of context, an icon, and one or more questions.

• Add a step at the foot of the list. Up to 20.
• Drag a step by its handle to reorder it.
• Duplicate a step to copy its questions. The copy gets new question ids, so the answers already collected are never overwritten.
• Delete a step. The last one cannot be deleted; a form needs at least one.

Put one question on a step wherever you can. Two or three belong together only when they are really one thought: a first name and a last name, a city and a country. Asking for a surname on its own screen is theatre rather than focus.

Question types

Fifteen types, grouped in the picker by what they collect.

Every question carries a wording, an optional help line, and a required switch. A few types carry more:

• Slider takes a minimum, a maximum, a step, a unit and a label at each end, so a 0 to 10 track can read Never to Every week.
• Rating runs from 2 to 10 and draws stars, hearts or lightning bolts.
• One choice, Several choices and Dropdown take a list of options. Several choices can also demand at least or at most so many.
• Several choices and One choice are picked with a letter key on a keyboard: A, B, C down the list.
• Statement asks nothing. It is the screen that explains the rules before a consent box, or that says two questions left. It cannot be made required, because there is nothing to answer.

Ask for a contact

This is what connects a form to your CRM. Under any question that can produce one, Save the answer as offers the contact field it feeds:

You decide which of them to ask for. A form can ask for an address and nothing else, for a name and a phone number, or for none of them at all.

• Full name is split on the first space: the first word becomes the first name, the rest the last name.
• Two questions cannot claim the same contact field. The builder stops offering one that is already taken.
• Marketing consent is the only field that decides whether the contact is subscribed. No consent question means the contact is created without a marketing status: it records that this person answered, and it does not claim they asked for email.

The preview

The right-hand column is the real public page, not a lookalike, following the step you are editing. Switch it between Desktop and Phone with the two buttons above it.

Settings

Five cards, and they answer five different questions.

Name and address

The name is what the library shows and what the first screen says by default. The public address is the end of the link: sway.events/f/casting-dj-2026.

An address is global across Sway: lowercase letters, digits and hyphens, 3 to 60 characters. It is checked as you type and the field tells you whether it is free, taken or unusable. Change it whenever you like, but remember that the old one stops working the moment you save.

Look

The colour, a cover image, and the words on the first and last screens: the opening title, the button that starts the form, and the title and text of the thank-you screen. Leave any of them empty and the form falls back to something sensible.

Behaviour

• Show the progress bar puts a counter and a bar at the top, so people know how far they are.
• One answer per email address refuses a second submission from an address that has already sent one.
• Label on the send button replaces Send.
• Send people here after they answer replaces the thank-you screen with a redirect. https:// addresses only.

When it is open

• Opens and Closes are optional dates. Before the opening date the page says the form is not open yet; after the closing date it says the form is closed.
• Stop after is a cap. Once that many answers have been sent, the form closes itself.

A form you closed by hand stays closed whatever the dates say. The reason shown is always the one you chose.

Contacts

On a promoter, an artist or a venue page, the contacts a form captures go into that page's own CRM, and the card says so. There is nothing to choose.

On a crew there is: see A crew's forms.

The consent sentence is the line shown beside the send button on the last step, and it is stored with the consent itself. Write the sentence you want on record.

Publish it

Publish is at the top right of the builder, beside the status.

• A form with no question cannot be published. The button refuses and says so.
• Save your changes first. The button is disabled while there are unsaved changes, because publishing an old version of the questions is the one mistake that cannot be taken back once somebody answers.
• Close the form takes it out of service without touching the answers.
• A closed form can be reopened, and a published form can go back to draft. Going back to draft takes the public page down; the answers stay.

Once it is live, Copy the link is on the library row and in the settings card. That link is what you put in a bio, a story or a newsletter.

Read the responses

The Answers tab lists every response, newest first.

Two kinds sit in the same list, labelled:

• Sent is a finished answer.
• Started is somebody who typed something and did not finish. Their answers up to the point they left are stored, and they are the material half of the statistics: abandoned on step three is a row you can open and read.

Filter between All, Sent and Started. Click a row to open the full answer sheet: who answered, how long they took, where they came from, and every question in the order the form asked it.

Export as CSV is in the toolbar and in the library's row menu. One column per question, plus the response metadata, and choice answers written as the option labels rather than as their internal values.

Read the statistics

The Statistics tab answers the only question worth asking of a multi-step form: which question loses people.

Pick a period at the top. Below it:

• Seen, Started, Sent and the median time to finish. The average sits under the median, because a single person who left the tab open for an hour moves the average and not the median.
• Where people stop is the funnel: one row per step, how many reached it, how many moved past it, and how long they spent on it on average. The step that loses the most people is named in a sentence above the chart.
• Day by day plots the three numbers over the period.
• Where they came from and Devices say which post worked and what people answered on.
• Question by question summarises the answers themselves: a bar per option for a choice, an average with a lowest and a highest for a number, a yes and a no count for a consent, and the most recent answers for free text.

The per-question summaries read completed answers only. A half-filled form would otherwise skew every distribution towards the first question, which is exactly the one everybody answers.

A crew's forms

A crew carries forms like any page, under Content in its sidebar. One thing differs: where the contacts land.

A crew has no CRM of its own. So in the form's Contacts card, a crew picks one of the pages it runs, and the contacts captured by that form are filed there. Only the pages you personally may write contacts to are offered, so a form can never capture into a page you cannot open.

Pick nothing and the form captures no contact. The answers are stored either way.

Events use the promoter's forms

The Forms row on an event opens the promoter's library. Build the form there, name it after the event, and share the link from the event's own channels.

If the event has no promoter attached, the row is greyed out: there is no library to open, and no CRM to capture into.

Who can do what

Both go to owner, admin and manager, the same roles that already hold the CRM permissions. A viewer or an editor gets neither, on purpose: a form's answers are somebody's address, phone number and words, which is the same personal data the CRM is gated on.

On a crew the permissions come from the crew's own roles rather than from the page, so a crew member sees the crew's forms if their role carries Forms.

The limits

A form that runs into any of them is a form nobody will finish. The caps are there so that cannot be built by accident.