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Pre-Screening Form

Template — instantiates Net-Additive Contribution Intake

A short structured form contributors fill in themselves — fit, provenance, restrictions, support offered, timing, risk — so an offer arrives as comparable data before any staff time is spent on it.

The Pre-Screening Form is the structured questionnaire a contributor completes themselves, before any staff member engages, that turns a vague offer into comparable, fielded data. Its defining property is that it front-loads the evaluation: instead of a coordinator extracting the relevant facts through back-and-forth conversation, the contributor supplies fit, provenance, restrictions, the support they're offering, timing, and known risks up front — and the output is a standardized record every later step can act on. It is not the front door itself and it does not decide anything; it is the self-service form at the door, and its value is that an offer arrives already legible, so the first minute of staff attention is spent judging rather than transcribing.

Example

A university research-data repository is offered datasets by researchers across the institution. Left unstructured, each offer arrives as a different email — some missing consent documentation, some with unclear licensing, some that turn out to be duplicates of holdings the repository already has — and a data librarian burns hours per submission just establishing the basics. The repository puts a Pre-Screening Form at the front of submission: the depositor themselves states the data's provenance, any consent or licensing restrictions, format and size, whether they'll provide documentation, and known sensitivities, before a librarian ever looks.

Two effects follow. Submissions now arrive as uniform records the librarian can scan side by side, and a share of unsuitable offers never reach the librarian at all — a depositor who realizes at the "do you have consent to share this?" field that they don't, self-selects out before consuming any staff time.

How it works

What distinguishes the form from a generic intake box is that it is a self-served, structuring instrument:

  • Fielded, not free-text. A small set of required fields — fit, provenance, restriction, support, timing, risk — so every offer produces the same shape of record.
  • Contributor-completed. The person offering does the structuring work, which is what makes it self-service and keeps the cost off staff.
  • Screening by self-selection. Well-chosen fields surface deal-breakers early, so obviously unfit offers filter themselves out at the form rather than in a later review.

Tuning parameters

  • Field count — how much is asked. More fields yield richer, more comparable records and stronger self-selection; too many deter good, busy contributors and depress submission of exactly the offers you want.
  • Required vs. optional — which fields block submission. Requiring the decisive fields (consent, licensing) guarantees the data that matters; requiring too much turns the form into a wall.
  • Structured vs. free-text — dropdowns and checkboxes (comparable, machine-routable) versus open prose (expressive, but re-creates the transcription problem the form was meant to solve).
  • Field revision cadence — how often the questions are refreshed from what later review reveals matters. Periodic tuning keeps the form catching the right things; a frozen form slowly drifts from what actually predicts fit.

When it helps, and when it misleads

Its strength is twofold: it makes offers comparable, so evaluation and routing can act on a uniform record instead of a pile of dissimilar messages, and it deflects a meaningful share of unfit offers through self-selection before any staff attention is spent — screening shifted as early as it can go.[1]

It misleads when it grows. A form that swells with fields deters the strong contributors it most wants and keeps only the most determined, which is not the same as the most additive. Fields can also be gamed — a contributor learns which answers pass and gives them — so the record's honesty is only as good as the form's design. Its classic misuse is defensive: piling on friction not to structure offers but to discourage all contribution, a hostile form disguised as due diligence. The discipline that keeps it useful is to keep it minimal and to revise its fields from real downstream signal rather than adding a question every time something slips through.

How it implements the components

The Pre-Screening Form realizes the structured-capture components:

  • standardized_offer_record — the completed form is the standardized record; its fields are the record's schema.
  • self_service_contribution_path — the contributor completes it unaided, so an offer is captured and pre-screened without consuming staff time.

It does not classify or route the record it produces — that is Automated Classification and Routing — it does not judge net value (contribution_net_value_review), and it does not provide the intake boundary itself, which is Intake Portal.

References

[1] Shift left — moving a check as early in a process as it can go, so problems are caught before expensive work is spent on them. A self-served pre-screen is intake's shift-left: unfit offers filter themselves out at the form, before any staff evaluation. ↩