You can make it easier for your text/email recipients to complete a form by pre-filling information you already know about them. To increase conversion, we recommend doing this for the cell phone number if you are sending a broadcast, and email addresses if you’re sending a blast.

To do so, you can use the Field IDs of items in your form, and add them as URL parameters in the link, with the values that you want to pre-fill.

For example, let’s say your form URL is:

<https://forms.oneswitchboard.com/alexis-for-mayor/volunteer>

You can pre-fill items by adding URL parameters, like:

<https://forms.oneswitchboard.com/alexis-for-mayor/volunteer**?field_id1=value&field_id2**> 

Here is an example where the form asks for “First name”. As you can see, the Field ID on the form is first_name. (You can change the Field ID if you want but it is not visible to the user on the form.)

In order to pre-fill the form with a first name of “Alexis”, you would create the URL:

<https://forms.oneswitchboard.com/alexis-for-mayor/volunteer**?first_name=Alexis**>

Creating the URL when using the visual email editor

<https://forms.oneswitchboard.com/alexis-for-mayor/volunteer**?email={{sb_email}>}&first_name={{sb_first_name}}**

Creating the URL when drafting a Broadcast or HTML Blast

When you’re sending a text broadcast or an email blast, you most likely want to create these URLs with reusable fields like sb_first_name or sb_phone or sb_email.

In the {{ }} syntax, when forming the URL, use ~ to combine a reusable field with parts of the URL in quotes "...", and put the whole URL before the | sb_link }} in parentheses.

For example, this will prefill first_name in the form with sb_first_name , and phone_number in the form with sb_phone:

{{ **("**<https://forms.oneswitchboard.com/alexis-for-mayor/volunteer**?first_name="~sb_first_name~"&phone_number=>"~sb_phone)** |  sb_link }}