Contact and Registration Forms and Surveys

How form and survey responses connect to family records

Quick answer: When someone submits a form or survey, their information becomes (or updates) a record in Contacts. Standard fields like name and email map automatically; custom questions need a matching custom field to be saved.

What happens on submission

When a visitor submits a form or survey, Growth Suite does three things:

1. Creates or updates a contact in your Contacts list. If someone with the same email is already there, the existing record is updated. Otherwise, a new record is created.
2. Maps the responses to standard fields (first name, last name, email, phone) and to any matching custom fields.
3. Stores the full submission in the form's submissions view, where you can review every individual response.

Standard fields map automatically

Some fields are built into every contact record and map without any setup:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email
• Phone
• Address (street, city, state, ZIP, country)

If your form has fields named First Name, Email, etc., the visitor's answers go straight onto their contact record.

Custom questions need custom fields

If your form asks something that isn't a standard contact field — for example, "Which programs are you interested in?" or "What grade level is your child entering?" — you need a corresponding custom field in Settings → Custom Fields. When you add the question to your form, you link it to that custom field, and the answer saves there.

If a custom question has no matching custom field, the answer still shows up in the form's submissions view, but it doesn't get saved to the contact record. This means it won't be searchable, filterable, or usable in automations.

Why this matters

The whole point of capturing form responses is to be able to do something with them — segment families by interest, follow up with personalized emails, build smart lists of prospects who match a profile. All of that requires the data to be on the contact record, which requires custom fields to exist first.

Best practices

• Before building a form, list the questions you want to ask. For each question that isn't a standard field, check if a matching custom field exists in Settings → Custom Fields. If not, create it first.
• Use consistent field names across forms. If your contact form asks "Phone Number" and your tour request form asks "Best Phone", they should both map to the same standard phone field. Otherwise you'll end up with the same data in two places.
• Confirm field mapping in the form builder. Each question in your form has a Field setting — make sure it's mapped to the right custom field, not left as a generic text input.

What if I want to track which form someone submitted?

Use tags or workflows. The most common pattern: when a tour request form is submitted, automatically tag the contact with tour-request. When a newsletter signup form is submitted, tag with newsletter-signup. Now you can build a smart list of everyone who requested a tour, regardless of which form custom fields they filled in.

Related articles

• How to create a contact form
• Where form and survey responses show up
• Sticky Contact: pre-filling for returning visitors