Need advice: Monday.com form flow for seminar registration with existing contacts
Hey everyone, I’m looking for architectural advice on how to handle a tricky form/contact scenario in Monday.com.
Our situation:
We run educational seminars and need to register participants (madrichim) who may or may not already exist in our system. Our current setup has a Contacts board as our single source of truth for people, but we’re running into limitations with how forms work.
The challenge:
We want to send a registration form to an organization’s director, who will then share it with their team members to register for a specific seminar. The problem is:
Scenario 1: Someone completely new to our system fills out the form
- We need to collect both basic contact info (name, email, phone) AND seminar-specific details (flight dates, passport info, health insurance, dietary requirements)
Scenario 2: Someone who’s already in our Contacts board fills out the form
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We don’t want to create a duplicate contact
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We still need to collect all the seminar-specific information
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Ideally we’d just link them to the new seminar
Scenario 3: Someone fills out the form with a different email than what we have on file
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Example: they were originally in our system as john@gmail.com but now register as john@hotmail.com
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The system won’t recognize them as existing, risking a duplicate
The structural tension:
Monday forms only submit to ONE board at a time, so we’re caught between:
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Option A: Use the Contacts board form
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Maintains single source of truth -
Can only ask general contact questions, not seminar-specific ones -
No way to link directly to a specific seminar during registration
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Option B: Create a separate “Seminar Registration” board with its own form
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Can ask all the context-specific questions we need
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Breaks our “Contacts first” logic
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Need complex automation to create/link contacts properly
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Risk of duplicate contacts
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Questions for the community:
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What’s the cleanest way to handle intake for people who may or may not exist in the system? Should we embrace a dedicated intake/registration board?
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How do you prevent duplicate contacts when:
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Someone registers with a new email address?
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The automation can’t find them by email match?
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Best practices for matching logic? Should we match on multiple fields (email + phone), ask “have you registered before?”, or use some kind of unique ID system?
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Is there a Monday-native pattern that handles this elegantly, or are people typically using external forms (Google Forms, Typeform) and importing the data?
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For those using a two-board system (intake board → master contacts board), how do you handle the automation and what’s your experience been with maintenance/complexity?
What we’ve considered:
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Using a Seminar Registration board as an intake funnel with automations to search/create/link contacts
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Adding logic to match on phone number or other stable identifiers, not just email
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Manual review queue for potential duplicates
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Just biting the bullet and using external forms, then importing (but we’d rather stay native to Monday if possible)
Would really appreciate hearing how others have solved this, especially if you’re managing registrations/enrollments where participants might be new OR returning.
Thanks in advance!