Triggering on Dates

Workflows can be triggered on dates setup in your infoodle site.

Which fields are available to be used as a trigger?

The following shows you the date fields that are available and some possible scenarios where you would want to use them as a trigger.

Custom Fields

• Any field that is available in the custom field area. This will be up to your own setup, but common examples may include dates such as Police Check date, Membership start date, First contact date. Triggers on these are helpful to send out communications before a police check is due, or a membership is due to ensure they are renewed in time.
• Date of Birth. This is great for birthday anniversaries
• Date of Death. This can be useful to setup reminders to visit the surviving spouse at the anniversary of their spouses death.

Group Membership

• Date joined a group. Can be helpful if you use this for your memberships.
• Date left a group. Helpful if you want automate collection of feedback once people have left a group for example.

Pledge Dates

• If you have the finance package and are using pledges, you may want to send out a reminder that a pledge is going to be, or needs to be processed in a weeks time.

How does it work?

infoodle will 'login' as the user specified and try to find records that match the triggers criteria. If any are found, it then runs the steps specified in the workflow.

The process of checking to see whether a date matches a required trigger is done throughout the day on a continuous process, it does not just check once a day. This means each hour, infoodle will check to see if there is something to do. For instance, you add someone to the database at 3.30pm and it turns out today is their birthday. If you have a workflow trigger for birthdays, then this will trigger within the hour.

You can control this if you wish by specifying a time period that it is valid to run the check. e.g. You can tell infoodle to only check between 5pm and midnight. This means you can do all your data changes throughout the day and the trigger only happens on the finalised data.

infoodle will only trigger a specific trigger once a day for a user.

This type of workflow works well with conditional workflow steps. For example, you may want to check a membership date, and only trigger the reminder email if they are not already part of a current members group.

Considerations

Because the triggers are checked 24 hours a day, a trigger can happen over night. Text messages in particular are something to control. If you want to control the timing of text messages being sent, you can either set the time the trigger can be run to be during the day, or set times to embargo the sending of messages. Click here for more information.

What if it goes wrong?

When running a trigger, infoodle needs to run as if it was using the user specified in the trigger setup. It could be that the users login is no longer active or some other error occurs. This will turn the trigger off my deselecting the 'active' check box, and provide an error message. It will also notify the person who created the workflow of the problem. Once resolved, the 'active' check box can be ticked the the trigger becomes active again.