A client intake form is the document a creative agency sends before the first proper meeting. Its job is simple: collect the information that stops a project going sideways. Most agencies skip it, or treat it as a loose email questionnaire that varies every time. That inconsistency costs hours in follow-up and creates the kind of misalignment that shows up weeks into production when it's expensive to fix.
What a client intake form actually does
The intake form isn't a contract. It isn't a brief. It sits upstream of both, capturing basic context before you've committed to scope or cost. Done well, it does three things: it filters out clients who aren't a fit, it gives your team a head start on the discovery conversation, and it signals to the client that your studio has a process worth trusting.
West Melbourne Studios treats the intake form as the opening move in every new client relationship. The alternative, an ad-hoc phone call with no structure, produces inconsistent notes that different team members interpret differently. A written form produces the same information every time.
The sections every intake form needs
Keep the form short enough that a prospect fills it in without calling their assistant. Five to eight sections is the right range. Here's what each one should contain.
Contact and company details. Name, role, company name, website, and a preferred contact method. Include a question about company size. A 4-person startup and a 200-person corporate have different approval chains, different revision expectations, and different definitions of "quick turnaround."
Project type. Give the client a short list of categories: brand video, social content, documentary, training video, event coverage, or a free-text option. This routes the inquiry to the right producer before the first call happens. Don't make it exhaustive. If you've listed twelve options, the form already feels like work.
Project objective. Ask one open question: "What does success look like for this project?" Not "describe your project." The objective question surfaces intent, not just description. A client who writes "increase demo requests by 20% in Q1" is thinking commercially. A client who writes "my boss wants something for the website" needs a different first conversation.
Timeline and delivery date. Two questions, not one. Ask when they want delivery and ask if there's a fixed external deadline (a product launch, an event, a board meeting). Fixed external deadlines change everything about how you resource a project. Finding out at the briefing meeting is too late.
Budget range. This is the section most agencies omit because they're worried it will scare off prospects. It won't. Clients who refuse to indicate a budget range at intake are usually either very early in the process or not serious buyers. Give four broad bands as options, nothing more specific. It's not a quote; it's a filter that tells you whether a productive conversation is possible.
Key stakeholders and decision makers. Ask who will be involved in approvals. A single decision-maker and a committee of seven require completely different project structures. This question also reveals whether your direct contact has authority or whether you'll be presenting to someone you've never met in the final review. That matters for how you write your client approval process.
How they found you. Track your referral sources from day one. This isn't optional vanity data. It tells you which part of your portfolio strategy is working and which marketing investment is paying off.
Questions to leave out
The temptation is to ask everything upfront. Resist it. The intake form is not the discovery brief. If you ask for creative references, visual preferences, competitor analysis, and tone-of-voice guidance at intake, you're asking clients to do your discovery work before they've agreed to hire you. That's backwards. Keep those questions for the discovery brief, which belongs after the client has committed.
Don't ask about past agencies they've worked with. It reads as territorial and rarely produces useful information at this stage. Don't include legal or IP questions. Those belong in the services agreement, not the first form a client fills in.
Format and delivery
The form should be fillable online. PDF forms with fillable fields are acceptable. Email questionnaires with numbered questions are not, they get reformatted by different mail clients, questions get missed, and there's no structured data to review later.
Tools like Typeform or native form builders inside CRM platforms like HubSpot let you embed conditional logic so that a client selecting "social content" sees different follow-up questions than one selecting "event coverage." That specificity makes the form feel personalised without adding length for everyone.
Keep the total completion time under four minutes. If your agency has clients in multiple industries, consider two versions of the form: one for commercial clients and one for creative or entertainment projects. The core sections stay the same; a few industry-specific questions can be swapped in.
What to do with the responses
The intake form is only useful if it's read before the first call. Assign one person to review every submission before a meeting is booked. That person should flag any red flags (unrealistic timelines, budget ranges below your minimum, vague objectives with no accountability) so your team enters the discovery conversation already informed.
Store responses in your CRM against the client record. If the relationship progresses, the intake form becomes the first entry in the project history. If it doesn't progress, the data still tells you something about the type of inquiry your studio attracts and where the conversion breaks down.
Review your intake form once a year. The questions that consistently produce useful answers should stay. Questions that clients skip or answer with one word are either poorly framed or asking for information better collected elsewhere. Your intake form is a document that gets better each time you look at it honestly.