Churches collect information about children all the time: permission forms for youth events, medical releases, media waivers, baptism interest forms. However, People forms were designed for the person filling out the form to update their own profile. So when a parent filled out a form for their child while logged in, the child's information ended up on the parent's profile. We've heard from so many of you about this, and the workarounds weren't great: setting up an sign up in Registrations just to get the form attached to the right person, coaching parents to log in as their child, or falling back to paper forms.
Today, People forms can handle this natively. A new form setting, Allow submissions on behalf of household members, lets logged-in congregants pick which household member they're completing the form for before they start filling it out.
How it works for admins
In your form settings, enable Allow submissions on behalf of household members. This automatically requires submitters to be logged in on Church Center, since we need to know who's in their household to present the right options.
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One thing to note: this setting and the Household Members field can't be used on the same form. If your form already has a Household Members field, you'll see a message explaining why the setting is disabled. They serve different purposes: the Household Members field is for adding new household members during a form submission, while this new setting is for submitting on behalf of existing household members.
How it works on Church Center
When a congregant opens a form with this setting enabled, they'll see a list of their household members before the form itself. They can choose "Myself" to fill it out for themselves, or select any household member. If they're in more than one household, they'll pick the household first.
If the person they need to submit for isn't in their household yet, they can add a new adult or child right from the selection screen. The form then shows a header confirming who they're completing it for, and the submission gets associated with the correct profile.
After submitting, "Submit another response" takes them back to the household member selection, making it easy to complete the same form for multiple kids in a row.
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Works alongside Registrations
If you're already using Registrations with an attached People form (the attendee information form), that flow continues to work exactly as it does today. The household member selection only appears for standalone People forms on Church Center.
If you've been waiting for a simpler way to collect information for kids and other household members, we hope this delivers. We'd love to hear how it works for your church and what you'd like to see next for forms.
💙 The People Team,
Zane, Usborn, Shawn, Shane, Saryn, Kody, Julia, Gabi, Fred, Dave, and Benson