Automations: Spend more time building community, automate the rest

Community professionals are some of the best multi-taskers I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. From running events, creating content, to meeting one-on-one with community members and providing feedback to product teams, they run from task to task with unparalleled endurance.

Community professionals are so busy building and engaging their community, it should come as no surprise that CMX’s 2022 Community Industry Report found the top three frustrations of community professionals were:

1. Difficulty consistently engaging members
2. Difficulty quantifying the value of community
3. Efforts were largely manual and not automated

Many administrative tasks that may not be important to everyday operations end up as an afterthought. Think of tedious exercises like tagging members who joined an event or prioritizing member outreach. These tasks only get revisited at a later point, when community engagement starts to slip or an executive asks to see a report on community impact.

That’s why Orbit created Automations, now in Beta, so you can focus on strategic actions, not data entry and member profile administration.

What can you do with Automations?

Receive an alert

Get notified when a new activity, member, or note is created. Using the Slack integration in Orbit, you can connect your notifications to a specific slack channel to get notified when a new member, activity, or note is added. This empowers you to quickly respond when key actions are performed. For example, you can receive an alert every time someone comments in your Discord server or channel so you can make sure you don’t miss any questions from community members.

Automatically Tag Members

Orbit saves you time by automatically tagging members that use specific keywords in an activity. For example, if you want to understand if a member is unhappy with your product, you could select keywords like “poor”, “bad”, “terrible” and “slow” as your keywords and tag your members with “poor product experience” if any of those words are used in a community forum. You can then use that tag to prioritize your outreach and provide resources that will help improve their experience.

You can also use automations to tag members who attended a community event. For example, if you host an event titled “Community Event,” you can tag all members who mention your event on a community platform with the tag “community event advocate” to make sure to send thank you notes and swag after the event.

Improve your reporting

Once you’ve automatically tagged members, you can use member tags to improve your reporting and segment your community. For example, you can use the event tag to understand how many people engaged with your community via social platforms compared to the number of registrants to see if events are a good way to increase participation in your community

To learn more about reporting and segmentation, check out the Knowledge Base article. ‍

Stay up-to-date using Webhooks

Webhook actions in automations allow you to connect community activities with hundreds of other tools. You can link Orbit to Zapier, your CRM system, email marketing, and data warehouses—the choice is yours. Because webhooks are triggered when specific activities occur or new members are added, you know all your systems will be up-to-date, so you can take action using the latest information.

💻 Here’s how it works

1️⃣ Select the Settings tab

2️⃣ Click on Automations

3️⃣ In the upper right-hand corner, select New Automation

4️⃣ Specify what trigger you want to use along with any additional filtering you want to add for specific activities, keywords, or tags

5️⃣ Select an action that should happen when your Automation runs

Automations in Orbit make it easy to streamline administrative tasks that enable you to spend your time building community while a repository of ready-to-report data is automatically prepared.

If you need a little extra help setting up your automations, don’t hesitate to drop a question in our Discord server, attend a community event, or reach out to us directly.

We also have great resources on our blog, community page, and knowledge base page to help you get started.