The Manager registration form activity asks participants to register the person who should follow or support them during the learning journey. When a participant submits the form, Knowly stores the manager's name and email and connects them to the participant — and the registered manager receives a notification you've configured on the activity.
This article is about the activity you add to a journey's timeline. Knowly also has a step inside the Online signup form with the same name — that's a different feature. See Adding managers to a learning journey if you're not sure which one you're looking at.
When to use the activity
Use it when:
you want the participant to confirm their manager's contact details themselves (which is usually more accurate than guessing or importing stale data),
you want the activity to live in the journey timeline so it can have its own scheduling and notifications, or
you want to combine it with the Require manager registration setting so participants must complete it before unlocking the rest of the journey.
If you only need the manager email collected at signup, the Online signup form's manager step is usually a better fit.
Make it mandatory
To force participants to complete the form before they can reach the rest of the journey, go to Settings → {Manager} involvement and turn on Require {manager} registration. The toggle only becomes available once you have a Manager registration form activity somewhere in the journey — it has nothing to apply to otherwise.
What the toggle does:
when on, a participant who hasn't yet submitted the form is held at the activity and can't access later content,
when off, the activity is just a regular activity — participants can skip past it and complete it later.
What the toggle does not do:
it does not change whether managers get notified. The activity's notification fires whenever a participant submits the form, regardless of the toggle.
it does not affect the Online signup form's manager step, which has its own separate mandatory toggle inside that editor.
What the date on the activity controls
The date you set on the activity (in the journey's scheduling drawer) controls when the activity is sent out and made available to participants. It is not a hard deadline:
before the date, the activity isn't visible to participants yet,
after the date, the activity stays open — participants can still register their manager whenever they get to it.
If you want to remind participants who haven't yet submitted, use a smart reminder or schedule a follow-up notification — there's no automatic lock-out after the date.
Notifications you can edit on the activity
Open the Notifications tab in the activity editor to edit:
the email the registered manager receives when the participant submits the form, and
the participant-facing confirmation message.
You can personalize both with merge fields (participant name, manager name, journey name).
Customize what the participant sees
The Registration form tab is where you edit the form participants fill in: the header, the explanatory text, and the labels for the name and email inputs. The End screen tab is what they see right after submission.
The first time you open the activity editor, an in-app guide walks you through these three areas. You can reopen it from About this form in the sidebar.
If you've renamed "manager"
You can rename the role per learning journey under Settings → Nomenclature — for example to "mentor", "coach", or "sponsor" — with separate singular, plural, and possessive forms.
Two things to know about the rename:
it applies only to that learning journey. Other journeys keep their own term.
it's a literal string. Knowly does not translate the custom term for participants using Knowly in a different UI language — they'll see exactly what you typed, in your language. Pick a label that reads naturally for everyone who'll see it.
Preview before participants receive it
Preview the activity as a participant before launch. A preview helps you catch unclear instructions, missing resources, and wording that does not match the rest of the journey.