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Church Admin comes with a standard set of fields for every person and household record — name, address, email, date of birth, and so on. If you need to capture information beyond what’s built in, Custom Fields let you add your own fields to any person or household record.
Common examples include Transport Required, Dietary Requirements, T-shirt Size, DBS Expiry Date, or any other data specific to your church’s needs.
Finding custom fields
Go to Church Admin → People → Custom fields to view your existing custom fields and add new ones.
Adding a custom field
Click Add a custom field to open the form.
Field name
Give the field a clear, descriptive name — for example Transport Required or DBS Expiry Date. This is what appears as the label on person and household records.
Field type
Choose the type of data the field will hold:
- Yes / No — a simple checkbox, ideal for binary questions like “Transport Required?” or “Gift Aid declared?”
- Date — a date picker, useful for things like DBS expiry dates, baptism dates, or joining dates
- Text — a free-text field for any short piece of information; supports a default value that can be pre-filled for everyone
- Checkboxes — allows multiple selections from a list of options you define; useful for things like “Which services do you attend?” where someone might attend more than one
- Radio buttons — allows a single selection from a list of options; useful for mutually exclusive choices like T-shirt size
- Select dropdown — a dropdown menu for a single selection; works well for longer lists of options
Applies to
Choose whether the field applies to individual people or to households:
- People — the field appears on each individual person record. Use this for personal information like dietary requirements or T-shirt size.
- Household — the field appears once on the household record and applies to the whole household. Use this for things like “Christmas card required?” or a shared note about the family.
Default value and apply to everyone
Text fields support a default value. If you also tick Apply to everyone, all existing people or households will immediately receive that default value in the new field — useful when adding a field where most records will share the same starting value.
Show on address list
Tick this to make the custom field visible on the member-facing address list page on your website. Leave it unticked to keep the field admin-only — useful for internal notes or sensitive information you don’t want members to see.
Editing a custom field
You can edit a custom field’s name, type, and options at any time. One important caution about changing the Applies to setting:
- Switching from People to Household — works cleanly because the household ID is already stored against every person record
- Switching from Household to People — will cause a problem, because Church Admin won’t know which person within the household the existing data should be assigned to. Avoid this unless the field was originally set to People and you are restoring it.
If you need to change a household field to a people field, the safest approach is to delete the old field and create a new one, then re-enter the data manually on the affected records.
Using custom fields for filtering
Once created, custom fields can be used as filter criteria in the People directory — letting you find everyone with a particular custom field value and use that as a bulk email or SMS audience. Go to Church Admin → Settings → Choose filters to make sure your custom fields are enabled as filter options. See Address list filtering for more detail.
Using custom fields in CSV imports
When importing people via CSV, you can include up to five custom columns. These map to your custom fields during the column-mapping step of the import. See Import address list CSV for the full import process.