Churches Need Paper Forms

INTRODUCTION

A few months ago, my wife came home from a church event with a large stack of paper.

"What are those?" I asked.

"Paper forms."

In that moment, eight hours of manual data entry flashed through my mind.

It's easy to be cynical about this, and I see the sentiment online a lot: catch up with the times, pull out your phone, and fill in the form.

But this is far from a compassionate solution. We have to go back to first principles. Rather than telling people who use our products that they need to work around our ideas and systems, we need to think about why they might want something, even an antiquated something, in the first place.

For my wife, her reason is simple: when she puts a QR code on a screen and asks people to fill it out, she gets fewer responses and the digital abstraction leads to those responses being less personal.

She's not alone in this. The past two churches I've been at have paper forms everywhere: giving envelopes, new children's forms, prayer requests, praise reports, spiritual health assessments, surveys, connect forms, you name it.

While the digital side of my brain hates to admit it, I think they have a place.

In my own experience, I fill out paper forms right away whereas the digital ones sit on my todo list indefinitely. When I have paper in front of me, I feel an intentionality that I don't always feel on my phone. And to be honest, I'm more likely to fill out the paper form in the back of the pew when I get bored during the sermon than filling out a digital one if I pull my phone out.

So churches should be using paper forms. Not in lieu of digital, but as a complement in a well-rounded system.

But like most things, there's a catch.

While paper forms give you more immediate and personal responses, they also create hours of admin work. If you want to capture this data digitally and use it in any formalized process, you have to input all the data by hand into your tool of choice. But most form tools—Planning Center included—don't let you manually input form data. So churches either have to create a separate process for each submission type or they have to bring the data together themselves in a secondary tool.

Not ideal.

So when I started working on Church Space Forms, this was the core problem I wanted to solve.

TOWARDS A SOLUTION

To make this work, I first needed a way to build digital forms to serve as the backbone. It was easy enough to rework the email builder into a form builder, but I wanted to make this digital builder great, solving both needs a church has. I added advanced conditional logic, pages, every field type you could need, and content blocks to give extra info and resources to the submitter.

I then added in a way to link form fields to PCO fields and to have the form submissions go to a workflow card or profile note in PCO. A core part of the value that Church Space offers is that it keeps PCO as the source of truth for all data. This couldn't be the exception.

Now, we needed a way to get the digital form on paper. For this, I used React PDF. Super fun tool. I defined the CSS for how each field type should render which allows me to pass the form schema to the function. We then filter out content blocks (other than text and dividers) and filter out file upload fields. The user can then download this PDF in multiple paper sizes to suit their needs.

Once the user is ready to upload their submissions, they can open the site on their mobile device and scan them in. Each image is encoded to base64, batched together, and passed to a Trigger.dev background job along with the form schema. The job uses the Vercel AI SDK with Gemini 2.0 Flash to analyze the forms and convert the data to JSON. We then use Zod to validate the results.

Because the fields are matched by title, people are able to create their own designs for their forms and use those instead. This also means you can take any paper form you already have printed and make a digital companion for it.

All the results are then added to the same table as the digital submissions so that your data is all in one place. This gives ultimate freedom to churches while keeping their data clean.

WHAT'S NEXT

Churches are infinitely unique which is why I deeply believe there should be software of all sorts—forms, project management, communication tools—that is specially designed for churches. This is another step in that direction.

I hope this tool helps those of us in ministry to better care for our people. We don't collect data to stack up vanity metrics; we do it because everything from a prayer request to an email unsubscribe tells us something about the people that we've been entrusted to care for.

There are still a lot of things to be worked out. What do you do with conditional fields on paper? If a JSON response fails the Zod validation, should you use a different model to try again? Should paper form submissions receive a submission confirmation email? What's the best UX for someone to correct submission values that were processed incorrectly? Is traditional OCR better than visual intelligence for privacy? What other data privacy issues are there with this?

I'm looking forward to answering these questions in the coming weeks as I decide if I even want to put this out.

If you have any ideas or want access to the alpha, reach out to me at hey@thomasharmond.com.