How to get a consent form signed online

Consent forms are the paperwork nobody budgets time for and everybody needs later. A photo release you can't find when the client wants the shot in a campaign. A permission slip that came back for eleven of fourteen participants. An intake form someone signed but nobody dated. The document itself is usually one page; the cost is entirely in collecting it and being able to produce it afterwards.

Here's how to run consent forms online end to end — sent by email, signed in a browser, with a dated record attached to each one.

What counts as a consent form

Different names, same shape — a short document where one party agrees to something and you need proof they did:

• Photo, video, and model releases for anything you shoot or publish.
• Client intake and service consent at the start of an engagement.
• Activity, trip, and event permission forms, often signed by a parent or guardian.
• Testimonial and case-study permission, where a client agrees you can name them.
• Marketing and communications opt-ins kept as a document rather than a checkbox in a tool.
• Participation and research consent for anything with a defined scope and a withdrawal clause.

Liability waivers are a close cousin with slightly different mechanics; those are covered in how to get a liability waiver signed online.

The five-minute version

On Signed, the flow is the same as any other document:

• Upload your consent form as a PDF. Use the wording your organisation already approved — the tool doesn't rewrite your document.
• Drag fields onto it: a signature field, a date, text fields for name and contact details, and checkboxes for each specific thing being consented to.
• Add the signer's email — or several signers if a second party has to agree too.
• Send. They get an email, tap the link, and sign in whatever browser is already open. No account, no app, no password.
• Watch the status — sent · viewed · signed · completed — and download the signed PDF when it comes back.

The full step-by-step for any document type is in how to send a document for electronic signature, with the field reference in Sending & signing.

Make the consent specific, not buried

The difference between a consent form that's useful and one that isn't is granularity. A single signature at the bottom of a page proves someone signed a page. Separate checkboxes prove which specific permissions they gave.

So split them: use the internet, use in printed materials, use in paid advertising, use their name, use it after the engagement ends. Someone who agrees to three of five and declines two has given you a clearer, more defensible record than someone who signed a blanket clause — and you'll know exactly which asset you can run without going back to ask.

Signed also captures ESIGN/UETA consent to sign electronically as part of the signing flow, so the fact that the signer agreed to transact electronically is recorded alongside the signature rather than assumed.

When a second person has to sign

Plenty of consent forms need more than one signature — a parent or guardian alongside a participant, two people who both appear in a photograph, a client and their representative. Two ways to run it:

• Parallel when the signers are independent of each other: everyone is emailed at once and signs whenever they get to it.
• A signing order when one signature has to follow another: each person is emailed only at their turn.

Either way, assign each field to a specific signer so nobody can complete someone else's boxes. Both modes are covered in how to collect signatures from multiple people.

Chase the stragglers before the date, not after

Consent forms usually have a deadline attached to a real-world event: the shoot, the trip, the first session. That makes automatic reminders unusually valuable here — the outstanding signers get nudged on a schedule while there's still time to do something about it, and the people who already signed are never pestered. Add an expiration date so a form can't be signed a week after the thing it was meant to cover. The approach is in how to chase unsigned documents.

If you're collecting the same form from a group, the status dashboard is the useful part: you can see at a glance who has opened it, who hasn't, and who is one tap from done.

The record is the whole point

A consent form only matters at the moment someone questions it — often months later, usually when the person who collected it has moved on.

Every completed document on Signed carries a tamper-evident Certificate of Completion: the signer's name and email, the timestamp of each view and signature, and the IP address each action came from, sealed so later edits are detectable. That's a real record of who agreed to what, and when — unlike a scanned page with an undated signature on it (why print-scan-email costs more than it looks). What the certificate contains is in the audit trail explainer and Audit trail & certificate.

Electronic signatures on Signed are designed to satisfy the US ESIGN Act and UETA; the background is in are electronic signatures legally binding?. This is general information, not legal advice.

Where an e-signature isn't the right tool

Be honest about the edges, because consent is one of the areas with genuine exceptions:

• Some sectors and jurisdictions impose extra requirements on consent records — healthcare, education, research, and anything involving minors especially. Check what your regulator or insurer requires before switching a process over.
• Signed does not offer online notarization, so anything that must be notarised needs a notary.
• No SMS or knowledge-based identity verification. Signed verifies control of the signer's email address, not government-issued ID. If you must prove the signer is a specific individual to a high standard, that's a different product.
• No EU qualified (eIDAS) signatures.
• No conditional logic, so a form can't reveal extra clauses based on an earlier answer — build the variations as separate templates instead.

If you collect the same form over and over

Most consent forms are collected repeatedly with only the name changing. Build yours once as a reusable template with the checkboxes, signature, and date fields already placed, and each send becomes: pick the template, add the person, send. That's the difference between collecting consent reliably and collecting it when someone remembers. The workflow is in reusable templates for repeat documents, and the same logic applies to the SOWs and releases in e-signatures for agencies.

What it costs

Consent forms are high-count and low-value individually, which is exactly the volume shape that per-envelope pricing punishes. Fourteen permission slips shouldn't be a budgeting decision.

Signed is $9.99 per seat per month, one plan, unlimited documents, month-to-month, with a 14-day free trial. A seat is a sender; signers are always free and never need an account, so collecting one consent form or two hundred costs the same. The reasoning is in why unlimited documents matters.

For comparison, DocuSign's published pricing (docusign.com/pricing, checked June 2026 — verify it yourself; pricing changes and varies by country) listed month-to-month Business Pro at $65 per seat per month capped at 10 envelopes a month, with $40 per seat per month available on an annual commitment. A cap of ten is below what a single event's consent forms need. The side-by-side is on the DocuSign comparison page, the full breakdown on pricing, and seat mechanics in Billing & plans.

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