Customize your client brief

When to use this

Use this when the default BloomBoard brief doesn’t quite fit — you want to drop a question that never applies to your studio, ask about something of your own (delivery, allergies, venue access), or stop clients skipping past a question you need answered.

Customizing briefs is a Studio feature. On Core, and during your free trial, you see the default brief. Business → Client briefs shows a locked Edit your briefs card that explains what Studio adds, and the Budget question card on the same page works on every plan.

What you need first

The Studio plan.
An owner or admin seat — the editor is admin-only, like the rest of Studio settings.

Open the editor

Go to Business → Client briefs

Client briefs sits under Pipeline in the Business menu, right below Enquiry form. With Forms switched on for your studio, the page is called Forms and each brief is one of your forms, such as Wedding brief. See Forms.

The Your briefs card lists one row per event type: Wedding, Corporate event, Funeral / tribute, Bouquets only, Retail / holiday, Workshop, Styled shoot, Other. Each row shows how many pages the brief has and whose questions it holds: “BloomBoard’s questions” until you customize it, then when you last edited it, such as “Edited 3 days ago”. A pill counts any questions still incomplete, such as “2 incomplete”.

Choose an event type

Select Customize on a default brief, or Edit on one you’ve already changed. This opens the editor for that event type only — every event type has its own brief.

The editor

Three panels work together:

Pages, on the left — every page in the brief and the questions on it. Drag to reorder pages, and drag questions within or between pages.
The question inspector, in the middle — the details of whichever page or question you’ve selected.
A live phone preview, on the right — shows exactly what the client sees, and updates as you type. It follows whatever you select, and the arrows below it step through the brief one screen at a time — the contact screen first, then each page in order. The dots at the top of the phone count the pages, so none of them lights up on the contact screen.

Drag the lines between the panels to give whichever one you’re working in more room; BloomBoard remembers the widths you set.

On a phone, the editor opens as a preview only, under a note that reads Best on a larger screen. You see your client’s phone, with arrows under it to step through each screen, and Preview as a client runs the whole brief. You cannot add, reword or reorder questions, or reset the brief, on a phone. Use a laptop or tablet for that, and use the back link at the top to leave.

Every page shows its heading, then a row for each question on it. Where a question is worded exactly like its page heading — as most of BloomBoard’s pages are — its row names the answer type instead (“Date picker”, “Venue search”), because the client reads those words once, as the heading. Select the row to read or reword the question itself in the inspector.

Contact and Review & send are pinned at the top and bottom of the list. You can reword Contact — its title, intro, and email label — but not move or remove it: it always asks for contact details in the place your clients expect. Review always comes last. Select Contact and the phone shows that screen, so you can read your new wording where the client meets it. It’s the real screen, so Continue there asks for a valid email before it moves on — nothing you type in the preview is saved or sent.

Reorder pages and questions

Drag the handle on a page’s heading to move the whole page — its questions travel with it, the other pages slide out of the way as you go, and a dashed frame marks where it will land. Drag a question’s own handle to reorder it within its page, or drop it on a different page to move it there. Move the last question off a page and the page stays, empty, until you add a question or delete it — select it and the phone names the page and says “Nothing on this page yet, so clients skip it.”, because an empty page is one no client is ever shown.

Reword a question

Select any question to open it in the inspector. Change its Question (the label the client sees), its Helper text, and — for most types — its placeholder. Built-in questions carry a green “Event” tag; your own carry a sand “Custom” tag. Each tag names what sits behind the question after a dot — “Event · date”, “Event · venue”, “Custom · short answer” — so you can read a page and see which questions fill an event field.

Every field with a length limit counts down as you near it — “120 / 140” appears beside the label from four-fifths full, and “limit reached” when the field stops taking keys.

When a question is the only one on its page, its wording is also the heading the client reads, so rewording it renames the page to match. The page’s own intro line — and deleting the page — live under Page settings at the bottom of the inspector.

Require an answer

Turn on Required in the question inspector. For a handful of built-in questions, this also removes the client’s escape hatch:

The date question loses “still deciding, a season is plenty.”
Venue loses “we’re still deciding.”
Guest count loses “not sure yet.”
Budget loses “I’d rather talk it through.”

The inspector tells you exactly what a question’s Required switch removes before you turn it on, so there are no surprises for the client.

Clients see which questions you’ve required: a small star follows the question’s caption — or the page heading, when the heading is the question — and a ”* needed to continue” line sits under the page’s buttons. The phone preview shows the star the moment you turn Required on.

Clients must choose a budget, on the Budget question card of Business → Client briefs, still governs any brief you haven’t customized. Once you customize a brief, its own Budget question’s Required switch takes over for that event type.

Hide a question, and bring it back

Select a built-in question and choose Hide from this brief. It disappears from every page — it isn’t deleted, just set aside.

To bring it back, open + Add question on any page and look under From your event: every hidden built-in question is listed there, ready to drop back in with its wording intact.

Add a page

Choose + Add page at the bottom of the list. A new untitled page appears — give it a name and start adding questions to it.

Add your own question

On any page, choose + Add question, then pick one of seven types:

Short answer — a single line of text.
Long answer — a paragraph.
Single choice — the client picks one option from a list you write.
Multiple choice — the client can pick several.
Yes / no.
Number.
Date — the same calendar picker as the event date. Any day can be picked, and there is no “still deciding” way out; that belongs to the event date alone.

The new question is added to the bottom of the page and opens in the inspector with its label focused, ready to type. For a choice question, add at least two options in the Choices editor before it’s ready to show clients (see Autosave and incomplete questions, below).

Changed your mind? Select the question and pick a different Answer type in the inspector. Swapping between Single choice and Multiple choice keeps the options you wrote; swapping to a type that has no options drops them. A built-in question shows its answer type here too, but locked — the event field it fills decides that one.

Your own questions never touch an event field — the client’s answer shows up in their brief, which you read from the event, and in your submission email, exactly where their other answers do.

Edit the needs list

Select the needs question to open its item list. Reorder items, rename any of them, and add your own — a florist doing funeral work might add “Casket spray.” Remove anything you never offer. The same editor covers whether clients can mark an item “not sure” and whether the brief asks for a rough table count.

Style questions work the same way: select the style chips question to reorder, rename, or add chips.

Preview as a client

Choose Preview as a client in the editor header to open the real client form, full screen, with your changes already in it. Nothing you type here is saved or sent — the opening screen says so in place of the client’s “your answers save automatically”, and the photos page shows its upload area switched off with “Clients add up to 15 photos here — uploads are off in preview.” It’s just for checking the flow feels right.

Autosave and incomplete questions

The editor saves as you go — there’s no Save button. The header shows:

Saving… while an edit is in flight.
✓ Saved once it lands.
Saved · N incomplete, not shown to clients yet when something is left half-finished — an empty label, a choice question with fewer than two options, or a page with nothing on it. N counts the things to go and fix, so a question missing both its label and its options counts once.
Couldn’t save · … in red when BloomBoard refused an edit (for example a label that is too long). Fix the field the message names; the pill clears as soon as a save lands.

An incomplete question is kept in your draft but never reaches a client: new briefs for that event type keep using the last complete version until you finish it.

If a colleague saves the same brief while you are editing, the editor switches to their version and tells you — re-apply anything you had typed in the meantime. Closing the editor mid-edit still saves your last change.

If you see Editing is paused, brief editing has been switched off for now; your clients keep getting the last version you published.

Reset to default

Reset to default… in the editor header removes your customization for that event type entirely and returns it to BloomBoard’s default brief. Confirm the dialog to go ahead — briefs you’ve already sent keep the questions they were sent with either way.

Choose Done to return to the Your briefs list on Business → Client briefs.

What happens to briefs already sent

A brief a client hasn’t opened yet picks up your edits the next time they load it. Once a client opens a brief, it’s frozen — the questions they see and answer stay exactly as they were at that moment, even if you keep editing the template afterwards.