Customizing fields

The default visitor form asks for the basics: name, phone, email, photo, and a handful of demographic fields most churches care about. That works for the first few hundred visitors. Eventually you'll hit a Sunday where someone asks "why am I being asked my marital status?" or "why is the address required?" — and that's when you'll want to come back here.

This page covers the field configurator: turning fields on and off, marking them required, renaming them to match how your church talks, and adding help text to explain why you're asking.

Open the field editor

From Settings → Visitor Form, scroll past the access card. The second card — Visitor form fields — is a live editor that mirrors what the public form will look like.

Every field shows up as a card. Drag the grip handle on the left to reorder them. The toggles on the right control visibility and required state. Inputs at the bottom let you rename the field and add help text underneath.

The standard fields

These come built in. You can hide most of them, but a few are mandatory — they're locked with a small padlock icon and the toggles are disabled:

Field	Default	Can hide?	Can edit label?
Photo	Visible, optional	Yes	Yes
First names	Visible, required	No	Yes
Last names	Visible, required	No	Yes
Primary phone	Visible, required	No	Yes
Email	Visible, optional	Yes	Yes
Gender	Visible, optional	Yes	Yes
Date of birth	Visible, optional	Yes	Yes
Marital status	Visible, optional	Yes	Yes
Who invited you?	Visible, optional	Yes	Yes
Country	Visible, optional	Yes	Yes
Address	Visible, optional	Yes	Yes
Occupation	Visible, optional	Yes	Yes
Secondary phone	Hidden, optional	Yes	Yes
Notes / comments	Hidden, optional	Yes	Yes

The mandatory ones (first names, last names, primary phone) reflect the bare minimum we need to create a useful member record. If you try to make those optional in the database, the submission RPC will still reject the submission — so we don't expose the toggle here.

Visible vs required

Two separate switches per field, and they're not the same thing:

• Visible — does the field show up on the form at all? Off means the visitor never sees it.
• Required — must the visitor fill it in before they can submit? Off means they can leave it blank.

A field that's hidden is implicitly not required (turning visibility off auto-turns required off). A field can be visible but not required — that's the most common pattern for soft demographic data like marital status or date of birth.

WARNING

Don't mark too many fields as required. Every required field is friction. A first-time visitor on a Sunday morning has about ninety seconds of patience before they put the phone down. Required: phone number. Maybe address. Everything else: optional.

Removing optional fields

The fastest customization most churches do: turn off the fields they don't care about. Common cuts:

• Occupation — most churches don't use it.
• Marital status — feels intrusive to first-time visitors.
• Secondary phone — visitors rarely have one ready.
• Country — if 99% of your visitors are local, hide it.

Toggle Visible off for each. Click Save field configuration at the bottom right. Refresh the public form on a phone to confirm the change took.

Renaming a field

Each field card has a Label override input below the toggles. Whatever you type here replaces the default label on the public form. Useful when:

• Your church uses different terminology — "preferred name" instead of "first names," "mobile number" instead of "primary phone."
• You want to soften an awkward field — "Would you like a visit?" instead of "wants_visit."
• You want to add a question mark, an emoji, or specific casing that the default doesn't have.

The override is plain text. It doesn't support markdown or HTML.

Adding help text

The Help text input puts a short hint underneath the field on the public form. Useful for fields where visitors might hesitate:

• Date of birth → "We use this to send you a birthday note."
• Address → "Only used if you'd like a home visit."
• Photo → "Helps our welcome team recognise you next week."

Keep help text under twelve words — anything longer and visitors stop reading and start tapping past it.

Marking fields required

For fields that aren't mandatory at the database level but you still want visitors to fill in, toggle Required on. The form will show a red asterisk next to the label and won't submit until the field is non-empty.

The two we see most churches require beyond the defaults:

• Email — if your follow-up strategy depends on email (welcome message, devotional series, newsletter).
• Who invited you? — to track which members are bringing visitors. This is part of the first-time visitor recipe.

Sections

You can group fields into named sections — useful when the form has more than seven or eight fields and you want to break it into "About you," "Where you live," "How can we help." Click Add section at the bottom of the editor, drag fields into it, and rename the section header. The public form then renders each section as a step in a multi-page stepper instead of one long scroll.

For a default form (under ten fields), a single section is fine and visitors see the form on one page.

Saving and previewing

Click Save field configuration at the bottom right. Changes go live immediately — no deploy step. Open the public URL in a private/incognito tab on your phone to preview without the admin chrome.

If something looks wrong, every change is reversible from this same screen. There's no "publish" vs "draft" — what you save is what visitors see, instantly.

Where to go next

• Custom fields & photo — go beyond the built-in fields.
• Hierarchy & attendance — which campus, which service.
• What happens after submission.
• Back to Visitor form overview.