Custom fields allow you to add details about your congregation members in addition to the built-in profile fields. Using custom fields, designate a person's involvement in your church, their roles or preferences, or their completion of a process, then create People lists that include people with specific responses in those fields so you can follow up. If you want to know which custom fields might be the most helpful, check out some of our most commonly created ones below!
Note
Email Planning Center Support if you have creative custom field ideas that aren't included below. Check out our Common Lists, Common Forms, and Common Workflows articles for additional ideas to improve your processes!
If your church has membership requirements, set up custom fields to track those actions.
-
Record a personal testimony in a paragraph field.
-
Save the date of a baptism or other significant event in a date field.
-
Confirm membership class attendance using a Yes/No field.
-
Confirm a person's membership after they've completed all actions with checkboxes.
-
Upload a signed membership covenant into a file type field.
-
Add the date that a person's membership is finalized.
Note
Create a list that looks for people who have completed your process, and add an automation to update their membership type automatically. Be sure to set the list to auto-refresh in the list settings.
While you can create lists based on a person's involvement in other products, such as Services teams or Groups, you need to use custom fields to display specific involvement in other products as a column in your list results.
Create a checkbox field with options for involvement in other products.
Use automations in products like Groups or Services to update these custom fields on a person's profile.
Once you've updated a person's involvement in these fields, you can show these details in columns in your list results by selecting the columns icon on the right and choosing the custom fields you want to display.
Looking for people with a certain spiritual gift or occupation to serve in an area of your ministry? Use checkbox custom fields to record spiritual gifts assessment results, professional roles, special interests, or serving preferences.
Use lists to find people with specific responses in these fields so that you can send an email to them or use a bulk action to add them to a workflow for following up.
There isn't a default field in People to store family relationship information, but you can save these details in a custom field. This allows you to easily see how household members are connected or what each person's role is in the household.
If you use multiple methods of communication or have ministry-specific updates, create a checkbox field to show the types of information people can choose to receive or a Yes/No field to opt into a particular kind of communication.
Note
When creating your communication lists, add a condition that includes only those who have opted in.
If you want to create lists based on specific form responses, add fields to your form that are linked to corresponding custom fields.
Create a custom tab associated with your form, and add fields to that tab for the form information you want to collect.
Once the custom fields are created, add corresponding form fields. The answers to these questions update the custom fields on a profile.
Create lists based on specific custom field responses.
To show information on your check-in labels, such as photo release details or specific behavior issues, create a custom field and select Share with Check-Ins to add the field to your check-ins labels.
Use a custom field of the Yes/No type to identify people you want on your list that don't have specific criteria in common.
Select Yes for any profile that you want to see on your list.
Note
Use a bulk action to update this field for multiple people at once.