The first time Awards is switched on for your Rhythm account, Rhythm creates three starter forms: one nomination form and two application forms. One application form is for awards with no fee, and the other is for awards that charge a fee. This article explains why those forms are there and what can happen if Awards is switched off and back on later.
Why You See Forms Already There
Awards uses forms for two main tasks: nominating a candidate and applying for an award. To keep you from building those forms from scratch, Rhythm gives every new Awards account:
- A default nomination form, for someone submitting a nomination.
- A default free application form, for an application process that charges no fee.
- A default paid application form, which also includes the order and payment pages that collect an application fee.
All three forms appear as soon as Awards is switched on for your account. You do not need to request them or complete a setup step; Rhythm creates them because the Awards feature is active.
From there, you can use the forms as they are, edit them, or build your own. Each nomination process and application process chooses the form it uses, so the starter forms are a starting point, not a requirement.
Rhythm creates the paid application form for every account, even when payment processing is not configured. If you never sell anything through Awards, the paid form’s order and payment pages simply go unused.
What the Forms Contain
- Nomination form. The form a nominator fills out to submit someone as a candidate.
- Free application form. The form an applicant fills out for an award that does not charge an application fee.
- Paid application form. The application questions, plus order and payment pages, for an award that charges an application fee.
Creating these forms does not connect them to an award by itself. You still need to set up a nomination process or application process and choose the form that process uses. An award also needs its nomination and application processes turned on before people can submit anything. The starter forms give you forms to point those processes to; they do not configure an award on their own.
These forms use the same form-builder approach as any other Rhythm web form. A form is made of pages, each page is made of components you add to it, and transitions decide what happens when someone selects a button. You do not need to write code to build or recreate one. If you want to understand how a page's components become the finished form a nominator or applicant fills out, start with Web Forms and Configure Web Forms.
Tip
If you edit a starter form or build your own, use Next to move a person from one page to the next. Save Submit for a form's very last page, or for the only page of a one-page form with no fee. The default paid application form has an order page and a payment page after its application questions, so its first page should always use Next. If you clone that form and its first page shows Submit instead, applicants cannot move past it; change that page's button back to Next.
Tip
The button shown at the end of an application or reference form defaults to Save Changes. If you want it to read Submit instead, open the form's final page, open the Submit transition's Options, and enter the button text you want there.
Warning
Submission forms validate a name against Rhythm's built-in Name field, not a custom field that only looks equivalent. If you replace the built-in Name field with a custom one that captures the same information, applicants or nominators can see a generic invalid-name error when they try to submit. Use the built-in Name field for this purpose, even if you give it a different label.
Warning
Leave the Nominee field, and the Organization ID field, off a nomination or a contact-based application form. Rhythm fills in the organization from the submitting contact automatically, so including Organization ID on the form can cause submission errors instead of letting you set it directly.
Tip
To let people upload supporting documents on an application form, add an upload-capable custom field to the relevant page. Edit the form, edit that page's field group, add the custom field to the layout, and save the field group and the form. The upload option appears only after that field has been added and saved.
Tip
When you name the custom fields behind your award forms, include the program type, the specific program's name, and what the field is for, such as scholarship_2026_robotics_essay. Applicant-facing labels can stay simple even when your backend field names are longer. Descriptive field names make it much easier to search, filter, and maintain fields once you have many award forms.
Tip
Save & Return Later on a nomination form is meant to save everything entered so far. That includes custom fields such as file uploads and text answers, along with built-in fields like country, city, and notes. If a saved draft is missing custom-field answers when the nominator returns to it, that is not expected and is worth reporting instead of working around.
Switching Awards Off and Back On
For this starter setup, Rhythm only looks for the change from Awards being off to being on. It does not check whether Awards was on before, which creates one practical risk.
Warning
If Awards is switched off for your account and then switched back on, Rhythm runs the same starter setup again and writes the three default forms a second time. Because each form is identified the same way every time, the second write goes to the same nomination form, the same free application form, and the same paid application form as before.
What happens to a form you already customized has not been confirmed. The starter setup may replace your changes with the original starter content, or the attempt may fail without changing what you already built. Either way, if Awards is ever turned off and back on for your account, treat your default nomination and application forms as at risk and check them afterward instead of assuming they were untouched.
What This Does Not Affect
- Other forms you build yourself. Only the three starter forms use the fixed, repeatable identifiers described above. A nomination or application form you create separately is not affected by Awards being switched off and on.
- Which processes use which form. The starter setup only writes the three forms. It does not attach them to, or detach them from, any nomination process or application process.
- Awards being switched off. Nothing is removed when Awards is switched off. The starter setup only runs when Awards changes from off to on, so turning Awards off has no effect on these three forms.
Related Reading
Forms are a shared Rhythm feature. To learn what a form is, see Web Forms. To build or edit one, see Configure Web Forms.