Article 08
Your inbox and replying to visitors
Where form submissions go, what the visitor receives, how to reply, and how to keep prayer requests private.
Every form on your site (plan a visit, prayer, contact, booking, connect) does three things: emails your team, sends the visitor a warm reply, and lands in your portal inbox.
The visitor's experience
They fill in a form and press Send. Within a minute they get an email from your church's name with a short, kind reply. The default wording says we received it and someone from the church will follow up. You can change that wording per form in Settings, then Auto-replies. Keep it short, and do not promise a time you cannot keep.
Your team's experience
The addresses in Settings, then Notifications receive an email for every submission with everything the visitor wrote. Reply to that email and your reply goes straight to the visitor; the reply-to address is theirs. Add two or three people so nothing waits on one inbox.
The inbox in your portal
Open Inbox in your portal. Every submission is there, newest first, with a status: New, Contacted, Done or Spam. Tap one to read it, add a private note ("called Tuesday, coming Sunday"), and change the status. Filter by form type to see only prayer requests or only booking requests.
Use it on Monday morning: open the inbox, work through the new ones, mark each one.
First-time guests: the follow-up and your Monday list
When someone fills in Plan your visit, they get three things on top of the instant confirmation:
- A reminder the day before the Sunday they chose (or the coming Sunday if the form did not ask), with your service times and a directions button.
- A short thank-you the day after, whether or not they made it.
- Every one of these emails has an Unsubscribe link, and the guest's mail app shows its own unsubscribe button too. Someone who unsubscribes gets nothing more from your church.
Every Monday morning, if anyone is waiting, you get one email: the guests who planned a visit and nobody has marked as contacted. Each one shows their phone and email, so you can tap to call or text. When you have reached them, tap I called them in the email, or mark them Contacted in the inbox. They drop off next week's list. If nobody is waiting, no email is sent. Prayer requests are only counted in that email, never quoted.
In Settings, then First-time guests, you can turn the follow-up off, add a link to a short welcome video from your pastor, or turn off the Monday list.
Prayer requests stay private
Nothing a visitor writes is ever published on your site. Prayer requests are stored in your inbox and are sent in your notification emails (and to your own webhook, if you set one up in Settings). By default they are deleted after 90 days; change that in Settings, then Retention. Be careful forwarding them, and never post one publicly without asking.
Export
Press Export CSV in the inbox to download everything for your church database or a spreadsheet.
Spam
Forms have a hidden trap for bots and a rate limit. The occasional junk message will still get through. Mark it Spam and move on.
Sending submissions somewhere else
If your church uses a follow-up tool that accepts a webhook, paste its link in Settings, then Webhook, and every submission is also sent there. Email keeps working either way.