The ALC Network website provides every sub website with a powerful plugin called Gravity Forms. It allows users to create forms that appear on any page (or widget). ALCs use these forms to process enrollment, as contact forms, and to track student activities such as off-site learning.

Today I’m going to show you how to add an option to have form responses sent to the person filling them out.

Step 1: Create your form

Once you’ve created your form you’ll add an email field to the end (or anywhere within the form).

You can find email under Advanced Fields, this is different from a simple text input because it checks to make sure the input is an email and wont let users submit a non-email.

Step 2: Configure Email Input

Find your new email field and click on it to expand the field editor.

Fill in the Field Label and optionally the Description. Then click the Advanced tab.

I like to set the Admin Field Label which is a short hand version of the label that only admin see on the backend. For an extra level of cleverness you can set the Default Value with a “merge tag”, or code that gets replaced by a value, in this case it will default to the logged in user’s email address. If the user isn’t logged in it will simply by blank.

Step 3: Set up Notifications

Open up the form’s notification settings.

Create a new Notification.

Configure the notification to send to the inputted email.

Set the Send To button to “Select a Field” and then select the “email-me” (or what ever label you gave it) field. Note: Only Email Fields will show up in this drop down! Now go through the remaining settings and fill them out. It’s a good idea to use a no-reply@example.com style email, it indicates that people wont get a reply. From Name and Subject help set the context, this will show up in someones inbox so give it some though.

Finally set up the message, using the merge tag {all_fields} will send—you guessed it—all the fields to them. You can play around with merge tags to send a more personalized message.

Step 4: Set Conditional Logic

You only want this notification sent to people if the “email-me” field has an email in it. To do this you’ll check the box at the bottom of the notification setting page, for the notification you just created, and set up the following logic:

It reads: Send this notification if All of the following match: email-me (the email field you created) contains “@”.

So now your new notification will only send if the email-me field has an @ symbol in it, which we know will happen because all emails have that @ symbol!

Conclusion

Update the Notification and you’ll now have an option on your form to send the response to an email. Note that there is no way to tell if the person filling in the form will send to their own email… Be sure to test it out before letting your form out into the wild.