We mentioned in the Launching an Advocacy Program playbook that we're big believers in having an intake form. It's the handshake at the beginning of your relationship with each Advocate, plus the data you collect on your activation form is the fuel for your Advocacy program.

Yes, you have your foundational CRM data, but this is your chance to augment that data in a way that makes you more efficient and provides the best experience for your Advocates. Let's go!

Note: This playbook follows the naming conventions used in Champion. However the same basic ideas work even if you're just building a form with your marketing automation platform (or heck, even Survey Monkey).

Participation Options

Start your form by gathering your Advocates' participation preferences. Typical check-box options include: Event/Webinar Speaker, Third-Party Review, Quote/Testimonial, Case Study, Reference Call, Press Interview, Referral, Co-Authored Blog, Thought Leader Interview, Social Partnership, CAB Membership, and Research Study.

If you get other very specific requests from your organization (ex: User Group Host), be sure to include those too.

Champion-Specific Tips

Use interaction sub-types to group similar items together. For example, the main interaction type might be "Customer Voice" and then under that you could have sub-checkboxes for Quotes/Testimonials, Third Party Review, etc.

Change the externally-facing wording for any of the items in the list — this is a good way to reinforce familiarity with the future requests you'll be making of your advocates. For example, if your organization calls Case Studies something different, such as "Success Story" or "Customer Showcase", align your Champion interaction type with your company's language.

Hide items that you don't need (or don't need yet). One example is the Customer Advisory Board interaction option. If you don't have a Customer Advisory Board, uncheck that box. If you'll start one in the near future (3-5 months), edit the externally-facing text to something like "Customer Advisory Board [coming in Fall 2026]" so you're setting clear expectations. If you plan to start a CAB in the future but aren't sure when, then uncheck the box for now so you're not getting people's hopes up.

Interaction Capacity

One of our favorite features of Champion is that Advocates can select how many interactions they're willing to do in a month. If you're building a form outside of Champion, you can certainly include this option but you'll also need to make sure you have a mechanism to track all interactions and abide by the number they requested.

Champion Tip: Set this to 3 as the default. Your advocates can always lower it to 1 if they want to, but they probably won't move it up from 1 if you start with that as your default.

Additional Custom Questions

This is where the real fun begins! And this is where you spend the bulk of your thinking time when you launch your activation form.

Time for Deep Thinking

Instead of tossing in the first Custom Questions that come to your mind, it's worth spending 30-60 minutes looking at some data and historical requests to make the best choices. Why? Because you'll need to ruthlessly prioritize the questions that you do add (more on that in a moment), so it's worth making sure they count.

For the three areas below, prompt your memory by looking back at emails and Slacks/messages you've received over the last six-ish months. Make note also of seasonal requests, such as requests related to an annual user conference or a sales kick off.

1. Do you regularly need detailed geographical data that you don't have?

Examples include: accurate city information to feed a user group program, accurate state or country information to match reference calls on.

A common challenge is that the data in your CRM is often at the Account level and doesn't accurately reflect where your advocates actually are. This is your chance to solve for that!

Tip 1: If you're going to want to send handwritten notes or physical gifts to your Advocates from time to time, you can ask the question as: "What is your preferred address for receiving mail or swag?"

Tip 2: Don't worry: this information stays within Champion and will not overwrite anything in your CRM system. You can, however, work with your ops team to do a bulk upload into your CRM in the future if you'd like.

2. What are the most common match criteria requests you receive from the sales team for reference calls?

Examples include: previous usage of a competing product, use cases, areas of expertise, product they use of yours if you have more than one, etc.

Super Pro Power Tip: You may already include Competitor information at the Account level in your CRM, but that doesn't mean your Advocate previously used that tool. Plus, they may have used additional tools in their past roles, so there's a benefit of collecting this information on your form. Prompt your memory by looking back over your emails and Slacks from the last few months and see what kind of criteria the sales team asked for.

3. Has your manager asked for advocacy reporting information in the past that you were unable to provide?

This might be your chance to fix that. Not all of the above questions should result in custom questions being added to your form, but they're worth thinking through in order to help you ruthlessly prioritize what should be added.

Number of Questions

If you add too many questions your advocates may bail on the process. How much is too much? Anything more than 5 custom questions is going to start feeling very long for the submitter. But don't take our word for it – go ahead and add the questions in and then test the form yourself. Ask a colleague to test too. Then ask one of your top advocates to take a look and get their honest opinion.

Ruthlessly prioritize the most impactful questions based on the data deep dive you did at the beginning of this process.

Pro Tip: If your form isn't too long, consider having a little fun. For example, one creative idea is to ask for their favorite candy/junk food. Anytime you send a thank you box, you can include that candy. Most people will forget that they had given you that information, so they will be surprised and delighted.

Question Types

Use standardized answers (dropdowns, checkboxes, etc) rather than text fields as much as you can to help you quickly sort and filter in the future. This is especially important for data you'll want to use for Reference matching!

Completion Page

Edit the text for the "thank you" page to clearly explain what your advocate can expect next and approximately how long it will take. This is a moment to celebrate and welcome them to your program, so you have our permission to use a few exclamation points.

Next up: Part 4 — Engaging Your Advocates

‍Your form is live, your Advocates are opted in — now comes the part that keeps a program truly thriving: meaningful engagement. Part 4 walks you through how to engage your advocates in a way that is timely, balanced, scalable, and built for the long haul. Read on here.

This post is part of The Customer Marketing Playbook, a four-part series on building a strategic, scalable Advocacy program from the ground up.

About This Series

This playbook series was created by Champion in collaboration with Heather Foeh Consulting. Heather brings 19 years of experience in customer-facing leadership roles across customer marketing, customer success, and community building at companies including Eloqua, Oracle, Workfront, Adobe, and 6sense.

Champion is an AI-powered customer advocacy platform that helps B2B companies identify, activate, and mobilize their most passionate customers. Our mission is to make trust the most powerful engine for business growth — using the voices and relationships of your happiest customers to make business more human.