One of the most important parts of Registrations is the ability to collect information about people while they're registering. Of course, you need to know how many people are coming and what kind of tickets, types, or selections they're making — but especially for things like camps, classes, and VBS, you might also need:
📮 contact information (like email, phone, and address) for the person completing the registration
🧒 personal information (like birthdate, grade, gender, and emergency contact) for individual attendees
👕 additional options (like shirt sizes, conference sessions, and lunches)
❓ answers to a few custom questions
📝 waivers and other forms
You can collect all of this information with Registrations using a detailed signup! But if you’ve been using Registrations for a long time, you've likely developed your own structure for collecting information and might not know about some of our newer features. And if you’re new to Registrations, you might be wondering how to make sure things are set up the right way.
Whether you’re new to Registrations or have been using it for years, we want to help you create streamlined signups for your congregation — and make sure you and your event managers are set up for success! We're going to walk you through our best practices for collecting all the information you need in Registrations.
Collecting Contact Information
In many cases, you'll need to collect specific contact information from the registration contact (the person completing the registration). You can select the contact information you'd like to collect from them on the settings tab for your signup:
When someone signs up for your event on Church Center, they'll fill out this contact information in the first step of the registration. (If you need to collect contact information from individual attendees in addition to the registration contact, you can do that in your selection settings.)
Collecting Personal Information
Many events require specific personal information from all attendees, especially when assigning attendees to groups by grade, age, or gender. In your selection settings, you can choose the personal information that you'd like to collect from each attendee — and you can restrict selections to certain ages, grades, or genders:
These personal information fields are collected immediately upon selecting an attendee on Church Center:
Additional Options and Registration Questions
After you've collected basic contact and personal information, there may be more event-specific information you need.
For additional options like shirt sizes, conference sessions, or lunch options, we recommend using add-ons (which can now be required)!
For other questions that only need to be asked once per registration rather than per person — like how they heard about the event — you can use registration questions. You can include up to five custom questions on the main registration form.
Forms
Sometimes you need to collect even more information from people when they register — and for that, you can use a form.
If you need to collect a waiver or longer-format form, you can attach a People form or an external (PDF or online) form. Links to these forms are included on the confirmation page and email, and you can send reminders to people who forget to submit them.
If you're using Registrations for applications — for things like missions trips — you can also use the attendee information form. This is a built-in form in Registrations where you can add attendee-specific questions. This form will be shown immediately after someone fills out the main registration form on page two of the signup on Church Center.
There's so much more to Registrations that we didn't cover here, but these are the core best practices we recommend when setting up your signup. For more detail on all of the options we have available, we recommend browsing our Registrations Documentation.