Overview

Global Fields in Next enable organizations to maintain consistent, reusable data fields across multiple forms and programs. This eliminates redundancy, improves data integrity, and facilitates cross-program reporting. With global fields, administrators can define standard data elements once and reuse them across intake, profile, feedback, report, and award agreement forms.

Key Benefit: Create data fields once and reuse them across all your programs and forms, ensuring consistency and enabling powerful cross-program reporting.

Administrator Setup

Creating a Global Field

Global Fields can be added to any form by selecting the Global Field option from the form editor menu. 

If no Global Fields exist in your form, the system will provide the option to Create New Global Field.

When creating a new Global Field, a side panel will appear prompting you to select from the following supported field types:

• Single Select
• Multi Select
• Number
• Short Answer
• Long Answer

After selecting your field type, provide a descriptive Global Field Name. For dropdown fields (Single Select and Multi Select), you can add your options and optionally adjust the dropdown width.

It is always a good idea to create an Alias for your Global Field to make it easier to use when you create Calculated Value questions or to locate your fields in the Report Builder.

Remember that the Global Field is only saved once you click Create. If you close the modal or navigate away without saving, the system will not retain your incomplete field. A confirmation modal will appear if you attempt to exit before creating the field.

Reusing Global Fields

Once created, Global Fields are saved at the organization level and can be reused across any form within your organization. This includes forms within the same program or across different programs.

Global Fields can be added to:

• Intake Forms
• Profile Forms
• Eligibility Forms
• Request Forms
• Feedback Forms
• Award Agreement Templates
• Report Forms

Customizing Questions While Maintaining Data Consistency

When you add a Global Field to a form, you can customize the question text to fit the specific context while still collecting data under the same Global Field. For example, if your Global Field is named "Number of Participants," you can adjust the question for different forms:

• In an Intake Form: "How many individuals will be participating in this activity?"
• In a Progress Report: "How many individuals have participated to date?"

Both questions will collect data as the same Global Field, enabling consistent reporting across your forms while allowing contextually appropriate wording for each use case.