Every church needs to know something the software did not anticipate: baptism date, which campus, whether somebody has a DBS check, what year they joined.
Custom fields let you add those questions to member profiles.
Making one
Open People → Fields and add a field. Each one has a label, a type, and whether it is required:
| Type | For |
|---|---|
| Text | Short answers |
| Long text | Notes, anything paragraph-length |
| Dropdown | A fixed set of options you define |
| Checkbox | Yes or no |
| Number | Counts, years |
| Date | Baptism, membership, anything dated |
You control the order they appear in, which is worth setting: a form that starts with your most important question gets it answered most often.
Prefer a dropdown to a text box
If the answer is one of a known set, make it a dropdown. A text field asking "campus" will produce North, north, North Campus, N and one person's entire address, and nothing will ever group cleanly again.
The rule is simple: if you would ever want to filter or count by it, it is a dropdown.
Be careful with "required"
A required field is answered by everyone, including the person filling in their profile at 11pm who does not know their baptism date and now cannot save.
Required is right for something genuinely needed from everybody. For most things (dates, history, preferences) optional gets you most of the answers without turning anyone away.
Deleting a field
Removing a field takes the question off the form, but the answers people already gave are not immediately erased. They stay stored, unused, until purged.
Two consequences follow. If you delete a field by mistake and recreate it, do not assume the old answers reattach: check before promising anyone their data came back. And if a field held something genuinely sensitive that a member has asked you to remove, deleting the field is not the same as deleting their answer; ask us and we will purge it properly.
What not to put here
Custom fields are visible to staff, so they are not the place for:
- Anything a member told you in confidence
- Pastoral notes about someone's circumstances
- Safeguarding information
Not because the field is insecure, but because every editor on your staff can read it, and "who can see this?" is a question people should not have to ask about something they said in private.