Custom fields and photo

The built-in fields cover what most churches ask. Custom fields cover the rest — the questions your church specifically wants answered the first time someone walks in. "How did you hear about us?" "Are you visiting alone or with family?" "Any prayer needs we should know?" None of those are core member data, but they're exactly the kind of thing a welcome team wants to know on Monday morning.

This page covers how custom fields show up on the visitor form, and the specifics of the photo field — which is technically built in but works differently enough from a text field to deserve its own walkthrough.

How custom fields work

Custom fields are defined once at Settings → Custom Fields and become available everywhere a member record is created or edited — including the visitor form. The full mechanics are covered in Custom fields; here we focus on what they mean for the visitor flow.

Once you've defined a custom field (text, dropdown, checkbox, date, etc.), it shows up in the Visitor form fields editor at Settings → Visitor Form alongside the standard fields. Same controls: drag to reorder, toggle to show or hide, mark as required, rename, add help text.

TIP

A field defined in Custom Fields is hidden on the visitor form by default. You have to toggle visibility on here for it to appear. That's deliberate — most custom fields are for staff use (notes from a shepherd, internal flags), not for first-time visitors to see.

Common custom fields for visitor forms

These are the patterns we see most often:

• How did you hear about us? — single-select dropdown with options like "Friend invited me," "Drove by," "Google search," "Social media." Tells your outreach team what's actually working.
• Are you visiting alone or with family? — single-select. Lets the welcome team plan a follow-up with the right scope.
• Prayer request — a long-text field. Visible on the form, then routed to your prayer team via a workflow.
• Would you like a visit at home? — checkbox. Built in already as wants_visit; the form puts it at the bottom by default.
• Spiritual background — single-select (Christian, exploring, other faith, none). Lets your follow-up flow choose the right message.

The trick: custom fields are powerful, but every one you add is one more thing a visitor has to think about. Aim for three to five custom fields max on the public form. Anything else — staff notes, internal tags — keep hidden, and let your team fill them in after the welcome conversation.

Where custom field values land

When a visitor submits, custom field values are written to the member_field_values table and surface in two places:

1. The visitor's member profile under the Custom fields section.
2. Anywhere you've filtered or grouped members by that field — the demographics reports and the members table view if you've added it as a column.

Workflows can branch on custom field values too. If you want all visitors who tick "would you like a visit?" to get a different message than those who don't, see Workflow triggers.

The photo field

The photo is special. It's the only standard field that uploads a file instead of saving text, and the visitor experience is meaningfully different on a phone vs a desktop.

Visitor experience

On a phone, tapping the photo field opens the camera in selfie mode — most visitors take a selfie on the spot. They can also pick from the camera roll if they prefer.

On desktop, the field opens a file picker. Visitors rarely use the form from desktop, but if they do, they upload a profile photo of their choosing.

After selection, the form runs a crop step — a simple round crop to fit the profile-photo shape used everywhere else in GCM. The visitor drags and pinches to frame their face, then taps Done.

Why we ask for a photo

Two reasons:

1. The welcome team can recognise them next week. A name without a face is hard to spot in a crowd of two hundred. The dashboard's new-visitor widget shows the photo prominently.
2. The check-in flow works. If you use self-check-in kiosks, face-match speeds up the second-visit experience considerably.

Toggling the photo off

If your church culture makes a selfie feel intrusive, turn the photo field's Visible toggle off in the editor. The visitor form will skip the photo step entirely, the welcome dashboard will show a placeholder avatar, and check-in falls back to name-search.

If you're between "off" and "required," leave it visible but not required. About 70% of visitors will take the selfie willingly; the rest will skip it and you'll still capture every other field.

Photo storage

Submitted photos go into the member-photos storage bucket, which is public by design — see the storage section for the rationale. The URL ends up on the members.photo column and is what every other view in GCM renders.

The form compresses the image to a sensible max width before upload to keep submissions fast on patchy church-wifi connections. A 12 MB selfie from a recent iPhone arrives at the server as around 200 KB — plenty for a profile photo, small enough to upload in a second or two on bad reception.

Where to go next

• Custom fields overview — defining custom fields outside the visitor form.
• Hierarchy & attendance — auto-routing visitors to a campus.
• After submission — the workflow trigger that fires when a visitor record is created.
• Back to Visitor form overview.