Add/Update Contact block (matching, fields & custom fields)

The Add/Update Contact block is the most important block in Forms. It writes a respondent's answers directly into their Contact profile, and it controls how submissions are matched to existing contacts or used to create new ones.

Drag the Add/Update Contact block onto the canvas from the right-hand panel, then configure its Properties and Fields.

Contact matching

The block arrives with three fields by default, and SwiftFox uses them to decide whether a submission belongs to someone you already have:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email

When a form is submitted:

• If no match is found on these fields, SwiftFox creates a new contact.
• If a match is found, SwiftFox assigns the submission to the existing contact and updates their profile.

You can change which fields the block collects on its Fields tab, and that includes removing these three — but matching depends on them, so leave all three in place on any block that creates or matches its own contact. Remove any of them and the block can no longer match a submission, so every submission creates a new profile instead of updating the one you already hold. Add whatever other fields you need alongside First Name, Last Name and Email rather than in place of them.

A continuation block is the exception: it adds detail to a contact an earlier block has already matched, so it does not need these three fields of its own — see Collecting more than one contact on a form below.

Even with all three in place, a respondent who uses a different email address, or spells their name differently from the profile you hold, will not match — so expect some new profiles and plan to merge them.

Properties

In the block's Properties:

• Set the Question label shown to respondents.
• Use New or continued contact to decide whether this block creates its own contact or adds to one collected earlier in the form — see Collecting more than one contact on a form below.
• Turn on Capture a contact's organisation to collect the organisation a respondent belongs to — see Capturing a contact's organisation below.

Capturing a contact's organisation

Capture a contact's organisation is off by default. Turning it on adds an Organisation details block to the form, with an Organisation name field for the respondent to fill in.

Beneath the toggle, Set as the contact's primary organisation, even if they already have one makes whatever organisation they enter their primary organisation. Leave it clear if you want to record the organisation alongside any they already have rather than replacing it.

Organisations captured this way appear on the contact's profile like any other relationship — see Roles and relationships (two-way People to Organisations) (Document ID: 291).

Choosing how organisation names are matched

When someone enters an organisation name offers three options. Each one trades duplicate organisations against how easily a respondent can finish the form:

• Match or create a new organisation — an exact match links the contact to the existing organisation. Anything else creates a new one, so expect duplicates.
• Auto-suggest existing organisations, or create a new one — the respondent gets suggestions as they type and can still create a new organisation if theirs is not listed. This reduces duplicates without turning anyone away.
• Only accept a suggested match — the respondent can only choose from the suggestions. This prevents duplicates, but anyone whose organisation is not listed cannot complete the form.

Limiting which organisations are suggested

Both suggestion options expose part of your organisation list on a public form. Anyone filling in the form can see the names of every organisation that matches your filters, so treat the filter as a privacy control, not a convenience.

Because of that, SwiftFox will not show suggestions at all until you have set at least one filter:

1. Choose either suggestion option.
2. Scroll to Suggested organisations.
3. Select Add filters. The control reads Edit filters once filters are in place.
4. Build your criteria in the Organisation search filters panel, using the same list criteria builder you use elsewhere.

Keep the criteria as narrow as the form allows: a form open to the public should only suggest the organisations its respondents could legitimately belong to.

Collecting more than one contact on a form

A form can carry more than one Add/Update Contact block. New or continued contact, in each block's Properties, decides whether a block starts a new person or adds more detail to one you are already collecting:

• Create a separate contact — the block creates or updates its own contact. There is nothing else to set.
• Continue an existing contact — the block adds its fields to a contact collected earlier in the form. A Contact to continue list appears; choose the block you are extending. Each option shows the block's question label followed by its question number, for example Contact details - question 3, so you can tell two similar blocks apart. This option stays unavailable until the form has another contact block to point at.

Continuing a contact is how you spread one person's details across several pages or sections of a form, with other questions in between, and still write everything to a single profile.

The primary contact

Where a form collects several people, one of them is the primary contact. Use Use as primary contact on that block to set it. The primary contact receives targeted contact prefill and is the contact used for payments and subscriptions, so set it to whoever the form's payment or membership belongs to. A block that is not the primary contact takes no part in targeted contact prefill or the related display settings.

Watch for fields asked twice

Where two blocks collect the same contact, any field in both will be asked twice. The Fields tab warns you: Some fields are used by more than one block for this contact. Make sure those blocks cannot be shown at the same time. Each affected field is called out individually, naming the other blocks it appears in.

There are two ways to fix it:

• Remove the duplicated question from the continuation block — not from the block that creates the contact, which needs its matching fields — so it is only asked once; or
• Use conditional criteria so the two blocks can never be shown at the same time.

Fields

The Fields area controls which profile fields the block captures:

1. Open the Add field picker.
2. Choose from default fields (for example, Street Address, Mobile) and your custom fields, then click Add.
3. For custom fields, SwiftFox automatically pulls in the pre-configured options defined on that field — you do not need to re-enter them. This includes Date custom fields: add one and respondents get a date picker to choose the value, which is written straight to that custom field.

Answers entered against these fields are written directly to the contact profile.

Per-field controls

Each field you add can be configured individually:

• Label override — change the displayed label for this field.
• Field placeholder — set placeholder text inside the input.
• Hide the label — tick to hide this field's label on the form.
• Required — tick to make the field mandatory.

Open a field's row (the chevron beside it) to see these controls; the delete icon on the row removes the field.

For select-type fields (fields with predefined options), you can additionally:

• Choose how answers are displayed: dropdown, checkboxes, radio, toggle, or separate buttons.
• Hide specific options so only the choices you want are offered.

When to use Add/Update Contact vs Question blocks

• Use Add/Update Contact when answers should be saved into profile fields (default or custom).
• Use Question blocks for one-off, moment-in-time survey answers that should not update the profile — see Question blocks (types, Data Table & conditional logic) (Document ID: 205).

Note: when a form is distributed via a tracked SwiftFox email link, you do not need an Add/Update Contact block — the recipient is identified automatically by the unique link — see Managing & exporting forms (clone, rename, CSV, send by email) (Document ID: 206).