Hi everyone,
We currently use Gravity Forms on our WordPress website to allow volunteers to sign up. One issue we’ve encountered is that support workers from charities sometimes allow their clients to use the support worker’s email address to register—likely because the clients don’t have their own email addresses.
This creates a data integrity problem. We have automation in place that checks if a contact already exists (based on email) and updates the record if it does. But in these cases, multiple individuals are signing up with the same email, which causes the system to either overwrite existing contact data or fail to create distinct records.
Since this happens at the point of form submission, Salesforce validation rules don’t help, as they don’t prevent the issue from occurring in the first place.
I’d really appreciate any suggestions on how to improve this process. Specifically:
- How can we prevent or better manage multiple signups using the same email address?
- Are there any Gravity Forms add-ons or customisations that could help us flag or block duplicate email usage at the form level?
- Could we implement a secondary identifier (e.g., phone number, unique ID) to distinguish individuals even if they share an email?
- Are there any best practices for handling signups from individuals without email addresses, while still maintaining automation and accurate syncing with Salesforce?
My personal experience ... Gravity Forms is a pain in the butt, and it's hard to get good results from it. If you could switch to Form Titan or FormAssembly or something like that, you'd have a much better time in general.
If I had one of those tools, I would allow a group signup. Then the group registration could have a primary contact, and all of the other volunteers could be parented under that contact. Then create a separate custom object for registrations.
Side note -- My preferred method for handling forms in general (even with expensive form tools) is to integration to a custom object in Salesforce, and then use Salesforce Flow to manage everything else.
So for your situation, the solution could look like:
- Custom Object: Form Submission
- RecordType: Gravity Forms - Volunteer Registration
- In addition to the form fields, also create a 'conversion status' field. And then run asynchronous or nightly automation to create Contacts where necessary. This would give you full control over the conditions. The 'conversion status' would change to complete if a contact was created successfully. You could even create a queue of records where conversion status is set to 'manual review' by the Flow due to conflicts.
- Custom Object: Form Submission
