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Signup forms give you a brand-new way to add people: instead of entering them in Planning Center yourself or importing a CSV, people add themselves. You pick a Planning Center form (or let us create one for you), and Flowforth gives you a hosted signup page and embeddable forms for your own website. Every submission is sent to Planning Center, where it creates or updates a person in People — so your congregation data stays in one place and syncs back to Flowforth automatically.
Signup forms are currently in Beta. They require a Planning Center connection that includes the People scope, and only organization owners can set up or manage them.

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How it works

  1. You choose a Planning Center form to act as your signup form (or create our suggested one).
  2. Flowforth syncs the form’s fields and builds a signup page from them.
  3. Someone fills out your signup page, an embed on your website, or the form on Church Center.
  4. The submission is posted to Planning Center as a real form submission — Planning Center creates a new person (or matches an existing one) in People.
  5. The new person syncs back to Flowforth like any other Planning Center person, and the submission shows up in your Results.
Because submissions go through Planning Center’s own form pipeline, everything you’ve built on forms still works — automations in Planning Center, custom field values, list rules, and workflows all fire exactly as if the person had submitted the form on Church Center.

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Setting up your signup form

1

Open the Signup Form settings

Go to Settings → Integrations → Planning Center and find the Signup Form section. Click Set up.
2

Choose a form — or create our suggested one

You have two options:
  • Create our suggested form — We’ll add a basic “Newsletter Signup” form to your Planning Center account. It collects first name, last name, and email out of the box, and you can add more fields in Planning Center anytime.
  • Choose an existing form — Pick any form you’ve already built in Planning Center Forms.
3

Share it

Once a form is selected, you’ll get a public signup link (https://your-domain/subscribe) and two website embeds you can copy onto your own site. See the sections below for details.
The public signup link and embeds require a website domain or subdomain set up for your organization. You can configure one under Settings → Domains.

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Form fields

When you select a form, we sync its fields from Planning Center so the signup page renders the same questions — including conditional fields that only appear based on earlier answers. A wide range of Planning Center field types are supported:
  • Text and Paragraph (including Planning Center note fields, which render as a paragraph box)
  • Address — a full location group with country, street, apartment or unit, city, state, and ZIP
  • Household — one adult with name and email, plus up to 10 children. Each household member can also collect their own details, exactly as configured in the Planning Center field’s settings: for the adult, phone number, gender, birthdate, marital status, and anniversary; for children, gender, birthdate, grade, school, and medical notes. Each one renders with the right control — a dropdown, a date input, or a phone input — and only appears when Planning Center is set to collect it.
  • Phone — with a Mobile / Home / Work / Other location selector
  • Dropdowns synced from your Planning Center data, including Campus, Gender, Grade, School, and Marital Status. Every single-choice field renders as a dropdown, the same as it does on Church Center. Dropdowns that aren’t required also include a None option so someone can clear an answer — a cleared answer counts as unanswered, so any conditional fields that depended on it disappear again.
  • Checkboxes and Yes/No fields — single-checkbox fields render as a real checkbox, while custom boolean fields become a Yes/No dropdown
  • File uploads — a real file picker that uploads straight to Planning Center. If your Planning Center field allows multiple files, visitors can attach up to 5 files, 10 MB each; otherwise they attach a single file up to 10 MB.
  • Dates and other custom People fields. Birthday fields are limited to realistic dates and show a live age hint beneath the field — like “Jane Smith is 34 years old” — so a mistyped year is easy to catch.
Any dropdown or checkbox that allows a write-in answer also shows an Other option with a free-text box. Dropdown and checkbox options sync reliably, so these fields keep their real choices rather than falling back to a plain text box. Field descriptions you’ve written in Planning Center render with their formatting intact — bold text, lists, and links all carry over instead of showing as plain text. On top of your synced fields, the signup page always collects:
  • First & last name
  • Email address
These are required so Planning Center can create or match the person. To see your fields, open Manage in the Signup Form section and expand Form fields. Each field is labeled with its friendly type — Text, Paragraph, Dropdown, Checkbox, and so on — along with whether it’s required and how many options or conditions it has, plus when the fields were last synced.

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Re-syncing fields

If you change the form in Planning Center — add a question, reorder fields, change what’s required — click Re-sync in the Form fields section to pull the latest version. Your signup page and embeds update immediately. Re-syncing also refreshes the option lists behind your dropdowns, including the ones used by household sub-fields like gender, grade, school, and marital status. These options are fetched during a sync, so if a household sub-field is showing as a plain text box instead of a dropdown, a re-sync is the fix.
Your hosted signup page lives at https://your-domain/subscribe. Share it anywhere — emails, social media, QR codes, or your church’s website navigation. From the Signup Form section you can:
  • Copy the link with one click.
  • Open the page in a new tab to preview it.
If you’ve set up public category pages, a Subscribe button automatically appears on them as well, linking visitors to your signup page.

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Website embeds

Want the form on your own website? Copy one of the two embed codes and paste it into your site — the embed is a small iframe snippet that automatically resizes to fit the form.
  • Full embed — Your complete form card, with every synced field.
  • Simple embed — A compact version perfect for footers and sidebars. You can optionally hide non-required Planning Center fields so it stays as small as possible.

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Designing your embeds

Each embed has its own design settings, so it can match the site it lives on. Click the design button next to an embed to customize:
  • Background, text, and input colors
  • Button color, text color, and label
  • Corner radius (sharp to pill). At Pill, the inputs and submit button round fully, while the form card itself caps at a gentle rounding so the form still reads as a card.
  • Font (Inter, system, serif, mono, or rounded)
  • Input size — Compact, Default, or Large
  • Field spacing — Compact, Default, or Relaxed vertical space between fields
  • Submit inline with email — put the submit button on the same row as the email field. This is offered only when the form collects just name and email, so there’s room for it.
The Customize preview is fully interactive: try any field, and watch conditional fields appear as you answer, so you see exactly what visitors will experience. Changes are previewed live and apply as soon as you save — no need to re-copy the embed code. If you close Customize with unsaved changes, we’ll ask before discarding them.

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Managing your signup form

Click Manage in the Signup Form section to open the management dialog. From here you can:
  • Change form — Switch to a different Planning Center form. The new form’s fields are synced right away.
  • Open in Church Center — Use the ⋯ menu to open the form’s public page on Church Center, exactly as your congregation sees it.
  • Open in People — Also in the ⋯ menu, jump straight to the form’s fields editor in Planning Center People to edit questions, options, and requirements.
  • Remove form — Clears your selected form, its synced fields, and your embed designs. Submissions you’ve already collected are kept, and you can select a form again anytime.

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Results & submissions

Every submission is recorded under Results in the management dialog — click View results to see them all. For each submission you’ll see who signed up (name and email), their answers to your form’s questions, and whether the submission synced to Planning Center successfully. Submissions are captured no matter where the form was filled out:
  • Your hosted signup page
  • Either website embed
  • The form’s own page on Church Center — we listen for Planning Center’s form submission events, so even signups that never touch Flowforth show up in your results.
If a submitter matches an existing Planning Center person, Planning Center may ask them to verify their email before the submission is applied — this protects existing profiles from being modified by someone else. The signup page lets the person know to check their inbox when that happens.

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Subscription status

Submitting a signup form is an explicit opt-in. If the submitter’s email address had previously unsubscribed from your emails, we automatically flip them back to subscribed — so people who change their mind can simply sign up again.

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Spam protection

Public forms attract bots, so signups are protected automatically, on several levels at once:
  • Per-visitor rate limiting — rapid-fire submissions from the same visitor are turned away.
  • A hidden honeypot field — a field real people never see, which bots fill in and give themselves away.
  • Invisible Cloudflare Turnstile verification — every submission is verified in the background. Visitors only ever see a challenge if one is genuinely required.
  • A per-email cooldown — the same email address can submit at most 3 times in 24 hours.
Blocked submissions are discarded silently, without ever touching your Planning Center account.

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How this fits with your lists

The signup form pairs perfectly with the custom checkboxes field workflow:
  1. Add a checkboxes field (e.g. “Newsletters”) to your signup form in Planning Center.
  2. Create auto-refreshing Planning Center lists from that field’s values.
  3. Those lists sync to Flowforth, so new signups land on the right email lists automatically — no manual steps.
For help setting up your signup form, contact support@flowforth.co.