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Product Updates
Product Updates
Introducing: Automation workflows
David Simpson
May 24, 2019
We're really excited to announce Beacon workflows. Although in its infancy (we've released workflows into Beta testing for our customers this week), the workflows feature will allow you to automate time consuming tasks and build your own helpful automations within Beacon.
If you're like many other organisations, you probably have a lot of manual tasks you need to do every day/week/month.
These tedious manual tasks usually end up getting in the way of making a difference. With workflows you can automate these tasks so you can get on with the important work in your organisation.
You can build a workflow to alert you when a donor donates over £100, and to alert the Head of Fundraising when a donor donates over £500. Soon you'll be able to use workflows to send your team a summary of your key metrics every morning, alert you when the 100th person has signed up for an event, or to send you an email if your iZettle's battery is running low. Integrations just allow you to connect to other systems. Automation allows you to actually do things with them.
Lets take a quick look at how this works.
Each workflow has a single trigger, some filter conditions, and one or more actions to perform if the filter conditions are met. This simple three step process allows you to easily create automations within Beacon. You can create many automations to trigger different actions in different circumstances.
Your trigger describes the circumstances under which your workflow should run. Here we set the trigger based on a donor submitting a donation form.
In the future we will be adding triggers that are based on dates and times (e.g. run this workflow every Wednesday morning or on the first Monday of the month) and other services that you currently use (e.g. run this workflow whenever a contactless donation happens via iZettle or whenever someone unsubscribes from a mailchimp list).
Once a workflow is running you can use filters to decide whether you should run the actions for this workflow or just stop and do nothing. For example, you can set up filters to only run the action if this donation is from the UK and the amount is over £100.
This is the thing that you want to do. For now, you can send an email to anyone you choose and specify its content. The trigger provides information about what triggered the workflow which can be included in the emai.
Workflows are now live and ready for your to try right now. Log in to try it out.
For now we only have one kind of trigger available: Form submissions. In the coming weeks and months we'll be adding more triggers and actions to allow you to connect and customise how more of your other systems work with Beacon. This is the start of something really new and exciting.
As always, we've written comprehensive documentation on how to use these shiny new features. You can read about automation with Beacon here
I'm really keen to hear what you think! Fire off an email to david@beaconcrm.co.uk or click the chat button in the bottom right corner of this page to get in touch.
