If your activity carries any risk — a class, a session, an event, a treatment — you probably need a waiver or a consent form. Done on paper, it becomes a clipboard scramble at the door and a shoebox of pages you can never search when you need one.
Online, the same waiver is signed in advance, stored in order, and pulled up instantly if you ever have to. This is not legal advice, but it is a far more reliable way to run the process.
State the terms in plain language
A waiver only protects you if the person genuinely read and understood it. Dense legalese works against that. Lay out what they are agreeing to in clear sections so the consent is real, not just a tick.
- Describe the activity and its risks honestly.
- Spell out what the participant is agreeing to.
- Keep the language readable, not lawyerly for its own sake.
Capture a real, dated agreement
The value of a waiver is the record that a specific person agreed on a specific day. Collect their full name, the date, and an explicit confirmation — a checkbox or typed signature — that they accept the terms.
For minors, add a field for the parent or guardian, since the person signing may not be the participant.
Collect it before the day, not at the door
The whole point is to remove the paperwork from the moment people arrive. Send the waiver link when they book or register, so signing is done in advance and the door is just a welcome.
- Attach the waiver link to your booking confirmation.
- Make signing a required step, not an optional one.
- Keep every signed record searchable by name and date.
Keep the records where you can find them
A waiver you cannot locate is no protection at all. Storing submissions in one organised place — retrievable by name — means that if you ever need a specific person's consent, it is a search, not an archaeology dig.
You can build a waiver or consent form with a required agreement and a stored record, free, at onesol.io/forms.
What Makes an Online Signature Actually Hold Up
For most everyday waivers — a fitness class, a trampoline park, a workshop — you don't need specialist e-signature software. What you need is a record that shows the person read the terms and agreed on a specific date. A typed full name, a ticked "I have read and agree" box, and an automatically captured timestamp cover the essentials for low-risk activities.
The part people forget is keeping the record in a form they can't dispute later. When the waiver is submitted, email a copy of exactly what they agreed to back to them, and store your own copy. A useful record includes:
One caveat worth stating plainly: this is fine for ordinary, low-risk consent, but anything with real legal or medical exposure — surgery, high-risk sport, anything involving significant liability — should be drafted or reviewed by a solicitor. The form is the mechanism, not the legal advice.
- The person's typed name and the date and time of submission
- The exact wording of the consent they agreed to, not just "agreed: yes"
- A copy sent to their own email, so both sides hold the same document
- The version of the text that was live, so you know which wording they saw
Handle the Under-18 Case on Purpose
A waiver signed by a child generally isn't worth much; you need a parent or guardian to consent on their behalf. If minors take part in your activity, the form has to account for that rather than hoping adults sign for themselves. The clean way is a conditional section: ask the participant's age or date of birth first, and if they're under 18, reveal a guardian block.
That guardian block should collect the guardian's full name, their relationship to the child, and a separate agreement in the guardian's own words ("I am the parent or guardian of the named participant and I consent on their behalf"). A children's football camp or a soft-play centre lives or dies on getting this right, because the adult at drop-off is often not the one who signed.
While you're there, capture an emergency contact and any relevant medical notes for under-18s specifically — the same conditional logic that shows the guardian section is the natural place to ask. Adults filling in their own waiver don't need to see any of it.
Write Consent People Can Actually Read
Consent buried in a wall of legal text isn't really consent, and bundling several different agreements into one tick is weaker than it looks. If your form asks people to agree to emergency medical treatment, to being photographed, and to marketing emails all under a single "I agree", you've made every one of those agreements easy to challenge.
Split distinct consents into distinct ticks. A separate, unticked-by-default box for "you may use photos of me on social media" is both cleaner and fairer to the person — plenty will happily sign the safety waiver and decline the photos, and that's a perfectly reasonable answer you want to be able to record.
Keep the language plain and put one idea per line. "I understand that climbing carries a risk of injury" reads and holds up better than a dense paragraph that mentions injury somewhere in the middle. The easier it is to actually read, the harder it is for anyone to claim later that they didn't understand what they were agreeing to.