Someone fills in a form on your church's website. A connect card, a volunteer interest form, a baptism request. A few days later someone on staff copies it into Planning Center People by hand, and the follow-up starts late.
There are five ways to stop doing that. They differ less in features than in one question: where does the form live, and what built it? Answer that first and most of the decision makes itself.
The short version
- Your forms could be built in Planning Center: use Planning Center Forms. It's included with People and there's nothing to connect.
- Your forms live in Google Forms, Formstack, or Wufoo: Form Forward is built for exactly that.
- Your site runs WordPress with Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, or WPForms: PCO Bridge sends those submissions into People workflows from your own site.
- You have a developer and some time: the Planning Center API will do anything you need, and you'll maintain all of it.
- Zapier on its own: not for this. It can read from Planning Center, but it can't write to it.
Option 1: Planning Center Forms
Forms is part of Planning Center People. A submission becomes a person in your database with nothing in between, a workflow field can put that person straight onto a workflow, and automations can email them or add them to a group, team, or event.
The tradeoff is where the form lives and what built it. A Planning Center form is a Church Center page. You link to it from your site, but it's their builder, their layout, and their field types rather than the form tool your team already knows. For a first-time guest card that's usually fine. For a long volunteer application with branching questions, it can feel cramped.
If it fits, use it. Every other option on this list exists because it didn't.
Option 2: Zapier, and why the Google Forms page doesn't do what you think
Search for Google Forms and Planning Center and Zapier's integration page sits near the top. It looks like the answer. It isn't, because Planning Center's Zapier app only has triggers. A Zap can start when something happens in Planning Center, but there is no action that creates a person or adds anyone to a workflow.
The workaround is Zapier's Webhooks step posting straight to the Planning Center API. That brings a stored access token, a payload you write and maintain by hand, a paid Zapier plan, and no duplicate checking. We walked through that route step by step in How to get Gravity Forms submissions into Planning Center People.
Option 3: Build it on the Planning Center API
Planning Center publishes a documented API, and People lets you create a person, add their email and phone number, and put a card on a workflow. A Google Apps Script attached to a Google Form, or a small function behind any form builder's webhook, can do the whole job in a few afternoons.
What you take on is everything after the first successful test. Matching: search for the person by email before creating one, and decide what happens when two people in a household share one email address. The credential: a Personal Access Token carries the permissions of the person who made it, often an admin. Failures: when Planning Center is briefly unreachable, the submission has to wait somewhere and try again. And upkeep, which lands on whoever inherits the script after the volunteer who wrote it moves on.
None of that is hard. All of it is yours.
Option 4: Form Forward
Form Forward is a hosted service that sits between your form builder and Planning Center. You connect a form, point it at a workflow, and submissions arrive as people on that workflow. It says it prevents duplicates, and it's listed in Planning Center's integrations directory under People.
As of September 2026 its site lists four form builders: Google Forms, Formstack, Wufoo, and Gravity Forms. The Basic plan is $9 a month for five forms. Premium is $29 a month for unlimited forms and adds embedding the submission as notes, error reporting, and a dedicated support rep. Both include unlimited submissions.
If your forms are in Google Forms, Formstack, or Wufoo, this is the tool built for your situation. PCO Bridge doesn't connect to any of those three, so we'd point you there.
Option 5: PCO Bridge
PCO Bridge is a WordPress plugin with a hosted server behind it. It connects Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, and WPForms Lite to People workflows, and it runs after your form plugin has finished its own validation and spam checks, so nothing your form turns away reaches Planning Center.
There's no field mapping to fill in. Pick the form and the workflow. Name, email, and phone become the person's details, and every other answer is written onto the workflow card, labelled with the question that was asked. The settings screen shows what it found before you switch the feed on, and you can correct anything it got wrong.
Every accepted submission is saved on your own site before it's sent, and retried if Planning Center is briefly unavailable. Deliveries that fail show up on a Status screen instead of disappearing. A submission that can't be matched to a person with confidence is held for review rather than written blind. How to add form feeds to your WordPress website covers the setup screen by screen.
Two things set it apart from a form relay. It works with Contact Form 7 and WPForms Lite, two free form plugins that Form Forward doesn't list. And the same plugin brings your Planning Center groups onto your site as real pages on your own domain, which we explain in How to put Planning Center groups on a WordPress site.
What it doesn't do yet is anything outside WordPress. It's in beta, and applications are open.
Five things to test before you trust any of them
Whichever route you choose, send a few test submissions before you put the form in the bulletin, and check:
- Submit twice with the same email. Do you end up with one person or two?
- Submit with an email a spouse already uses. Which record got the card, and would your staff have picked the same one?
- Open the workflow card. Can the person doing follow-up see the prayer request or the ministry interest, or only a name?
- Ask what happens if Planning Center is unreachable at the moment someone submits. Is the submission retried later, or lost, and does anyone find out?
- Ask what the integration holds. A token that can read your whole database, or something narrower?
The last two are the ones nobody checks until something goes wrong, and by then someone who asked for a call back has been waiting three weeks.
Which one should you use?
Start from the form, not the tool. If Planning Center's own builder is good enough, use it and skip the integration entirely. If your forms live in Google Forms, Formstack, or Wufoo, look at Form Forward. If you run WordPress and your forms are already built in Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, or WPForms, join the PCO Bridge beta and keep the forms you have.