Managing form responses

Managing responses

Form responses are shown listed on the Responses tab of the form View, with the most recent response first in the list. Use the Status, Search and Advanced Search to further filter a long list to find a particular response of interest. You can also Download the full responses list in PDF or CSV format.

For Public and Private (i.e. non-anonymous) forms, there is a Person column and a Responded column showing the date and time of the response. Responses to a form invitation and responses to a non-invitation form where there is a definitive match between the respondent's details and a unique person already in ChurchSuite are auto-linked. If there is no definitive match to an existing person, the response fails safe and displays Link response. Linking is optional, but you will be unable to run actions against the respondent until their response is linked, as explained in the next section. Note that it is not possible to unlink a response to a form invitation (to link the response to a different person).

The response Actions available, explained in this article, depend on the form's Primary Response Type, whether the response is linked to an Address Book contact or a child in the Children module, and the response status. Response Actions may not be immediately visible if the form has a large number of fields. Scroll horizontally to the right to access the response actions, or click anywhere within a response row to open that response's View in a pop-up and see the available actions for that response.

Linking responses

Click on a response to open it to View in a pop-up. For Unlinked responses, note that you can select to Add [person] or select Link response to locate an existing person to link to:

The Link response pop-up displays linking suggestions from the existing people in ChurchSuite and the matching criteria for each person. From here, you can select a person from the suggestion list or use the Search to locate an existing person to link the response to. If the person does not yet exist, click Add to create a profile for this new person. If the form has no actions, click Save; if, as in the below example, the form has associated actions, click Next to process those actions - see our related article Form actions for further information:

For non-invitation responses, you can change who a response is linked to or unlink a response entirely using the Edit person link option. Note that it is not possible to change the person linking or unlink a response that was received via a form invitation.

Finally, in this section, linked responses are shown on the Forms widget on the Engagement tab of a person's profile page in the Address Book or Children module. The widget shows the most recent Responses - or switch to see recent Invites. Clicking on a response or invite redirects you to the Responses tab of the form, subject to any form visibility restrictions.

Editing responses

If you need to edit a person's previously submitted form response, you can do so using the Edit response action found in the More response actions list.

Selecting Edit response opens the form populated with the existing response data:

A Resend confirmation checkbox, ticked by default, sends a change confirmation email to the respondent. Note that any data protection elements present on the form are not displayed in this context, where a user is making changes to a response.

Response change logs are maintained detailing user changes made to a response.

Please note that it is not possible to edit a response if the form has an end date that has already passed.

Archiving responses

To help distinguish responses that have been fully actioned from those that still need action, you can Archive responses. Archived responses can be Set as active again if necessary. Note that you can only Run actions for an Active response.

Working within the Responses tab of a form, you can switch between viewing Active (the default), Archived or All responses.

Updating people's details from form responses

As explained in the related support article, Smart linking form fields to people's profile fields, the fields on your form can be optionally smart-linked to the corresponding fields in ChurchSuite. Response data from smart-linked fields allows you to create a new person's profile when adding a new contact or child or to update a linked respondent's existing details when there are differences between their existing details and their smart-linked response data. In this way, form responses can help keep people's details up to date. However, consideration should be given to whether a difference is intended to be a permanent update to a linked respondent's details. For example, when a response contains a different email address, should the person's existing email address be updated? The consideration here is that a change of email address will prevent that respondent from logging into My ChurchSuite with their original email address. Remember, people with My ChurchSuite access can securely self-manage intended changes to their personal details, so you should carefully consider whether to treat a form response as a permission to update someone's details.

You can easily identify differences and selectively choose which data to update or leave unchanged. Smart-linked response data that differs from the linked person's existing data is highlighted in orange on the Responses tab. Differences include the use of uppercase and lowercase data, and where there is missing data, either missing from a smart linked response field or missing in the linked person's existing details in your ChurchSuite modules.

The same styling of differences in data is shown in the response View for a linked response. Click Edit person to view a full list of the differences.

The Edit person pop-up shows any differences between the linked Contact or Child and their Response. By default, their existing data is preselected, but you can selectively choose to update any of the existing data in the response data. Click Save to process the changes. Change logs are maintained against the linked person's profile for any changes made.