Documentation
Create an Activity Type
Whether you’re building a new custom integration that uses our API, or looking to manually add custom activities to the members in your workspace manually, you’ll need to create them as an Activity Type.
This article walks you through the steps to get one set up.
Custom Activity Overview
Custom activities are a catch-all term for any kind of activity you want to add to members in Orbit that aren’t created directly by our set of official integrations.
Examples of custom activities are:
- Product events, such as sign ups or plan/subscription upgrades.
- Manual additions, such as coffee chats, or 1-1 meetings you might have with community members
- Users creating help desk tickets in your support system of choice that you want tracked in Orbit
All of these are valuable additions that you could include as part of your member’s engagement with your community and product, but to use them properly you should consider two things:
- The activity type name
- The weight you want to give the activity
Create a new activity type
Activity Types can be found in the Settings section of your Orbit workspace.
There you will find all of the default activity types created by any of the official integrations that you have connected to your workspace already.
To add a new Activity Type, click the Add Activity Type button.
You will need to fill out all the fields, so let’s break down what each one is:
Source
The source of the activity you will be adding. For example, if you were creating an activity to track a new support ticket creation by that member in Zendesk, the source can be zendesk.
Key
A unique reference for this activity type that is especially important when creating activities via the API, or low/no code tools such as Zapier.
This can be anything as long as it is unique, but we recommend using a format of source:type_of_activity.
Using the same Zendesk example from above, a good key for that would be zendesk:created_support_ticket.
Note: Once you set this up, you can’t change it in future.
Short name
A short piece of text that describes the activity being done. This is also used throughout the Orbit workspace. Again, using the Zendesk example, Created a support ticket would be suitable here.
Name
A longer form version of the short name. Also used in the workspace, but with license to use more characters, a format we recommend is including the source. For example, Created a support ticket on Zendesk.
Weight
The weight is one of the most important aspects to consider. Every activity type has one, and the default weight is 1. However, if all your activities are weighted the same, there’s no way to tell a super-high-effort activity like creating a 15-minute YouTube video from joining a Discord server.
Weights will help surface members who perform specific activities more effectively, so think about the weight you choose carefully.
You might want to consider weight as a representation of effort. A weight of less than 4 is low effort, 5-7 medium effort, and 8-10 high effort.
Alternatively, you could think of the weight in terms of impact. Joining a Discord server is good, but it is low impact in terms of community contribution. Submitting a pull request to a repo is much more impactful and brings value to your community and product.
The weight you choose is up to you, but ensuring you have a good weight distribution across your activities will help you get more out of Orbit.
After you set up your Activity Type
Once you click Create, your Activity Type will be available from the activity types list. You can edit any aspect of it, except for the key, at any time.
If you change the weight of an existing Activity Type that has been used to create activities in your workspace already, only new activities will take on that new weight.
If you would like to re-weight all of the activities for a specific activity type you can contact [email protected].