Collect Content Beyond Social Media with Submission Forms

Social media feeds capture a lot, but not everyone who has something worth sharing will post it publicly. Some of your best content is sitting in someone's camera roll, never uploaded. Others want to leave a review or share a moment but aren't active on any platform. 

Submission Forms give you a direct way to reach them. Instead of waiting for content to appear on social platforms and aggregating what you find, you can ask your audience directly, collect what they send, and display it wherever it's most useful.

How It Works

You create a submission form, choose the fields you want (images, video, text, star ratings, and more), and share it with your audience. Submissions land in your Flockler account, where you can moderate them before they go live. Once approved, they display alongside your social feeds in any layout: Wall, Grid, Carousel, or Slideshow.

The form lives at its own URL, which you can share via email, embed on a page, or link to from a QR code. It works on mobile and desktop, so people can submit from anywhere.

Everything that comes in is yours. You can display submissions on your website, on digital screens, at events, or download them with contributor details attached for use anywhere.

How Bayer 04 Leverkusen Used It

On 14 April 2024, Bayer 04 Leverkusen won the Bundesliga title for the first time in the club's history. A 5-0 win over Werder Bremen, five matchdays before the end of the season, with 16 points of separation from the rest of the league. For a club that had never won it, the day was different from anything their supporters had experienced.

A year later, the club wanted to mark the anniversary. They had the official footage, the news articles, and the match replay. What they didn't have was the fan side of that day: photos from the terraces, family moments, and images that never made it onto social media but that supporters had kept on their phones for twelve months.

So they asked for them. Bayer 04 created a submission form encouraging fans to share their best photos from 14 April 2024, and built a dedicated campaign page on their website to display the submissions alongside the anniversary coverage.

More than 3,000 submissions came in. The club described the response as "sehr großer und äußerst positiver Resonanz", meaning very large and extremely positive. The campaign page became a community record of the day, built entirely from content the club could never have found on social media.

You can see the campaign and the wall of fan photos at bayer04.de.

What Makes It Work for Campaigns Like This

A few things came together to make this kind of campaign possible.

The form was built for mobile. Most fan photos live on phones. A form that works properly on a small screen, with a simple image upload, removes the friction that stops people from submitting. The rebuilt responsive form keeps the experience consistent whether someone opens it on a phone at halftime or on a laptop at home.

Moderation kept it manageable. With thousands of submissions coming in, you need to work through them quickly. Garde AI checks every submission for inappropriate content before it reaches the moderation queue, so the team doesn't have to review everything from scratch. Approved submissions go straight to the display.

The display felt like part of the site. Submissions appeared in the same layouts as any other Flockler feed, styled to match the Bayer 04 site. The wall of fan photos sat on the same page as news articles and video coverage, not in a separate tool or a third-party embed that looked out of place.

The QR code made sharing frictionless. Rather than asking fans to type a URL, a QR code on promotional materials linked directly to the submission form. Anyone with a phone could scan and submit in a few taps.

Other Use Cases

The Bayer 04 anniversary campaign is one example. The same approach applies across a range of contexts in which the content you want doesn't exist on social media yet.

Events. A QR code on a table card, a program, or a screen at the venue links directly to a submission form. Attendees submit photos and videos during the event, which can appear live on a display in the room or on the event page afterward. Useful for conferences, graduations, sports fixtures, festivals, and brand activations.

Customer reviews and testimonials. A submission form on a product page or in a post-purchase email collects written reviews, star ratings, and customer photos in one place. Submissions display on the relevant product or category pages as social proof, without requiring customers to post publicly on any social platform.

University and education. Student submissions from welcome days, sports events, and graduation ceremonies can be collected and displayed on the institution's website, without relying on students having public social accounts or using a specific hashtag.

Internal campaigns. Submission forms work for internal audiences too. Employee photo campaigns, company anniversary submissions, and internal recognition programs can all be collected and displayed on an intranet or at an internal event.

What's Included

Submission Forms are available on Pro and Premium plans. Here's what's included:

• A rebuilt responsive form that works on mobile and desktop
• Your logo, brand colors, and custom styling on the form itself
• Garde AI moderation on every submission, the same engine running on your social feeds
• Google reCAPTCHA using your own keys to block automated entries
• Free text, image, video, and star rating fields as standard
• Radio buttons, dropdowns, and checkboxes (Premium)
• Up to five images in a single submission, each becoming its own post (Premium)
• Submissions display in the same Wall, Grid, Carousel, and Slideshow layouts as your social feeds
• Download submissions with contributor details for use outside Flockler

QR codes are available on all plans. They generate for any URL, not just submission forms, so you can use them on any page or display, regardless of your plan.

Getting Started

If you're on Pro or Premium, Submission Forms are in your account now. You'll find them in the Submission Forms tab.

For step-by-step setup instructions, visit the Flockler help centre.

If you're not yet on a plan that includes Submission Forms, check pricing or start a free 14-day trial to see the feature in full.