Documentation
Automations [deprecated]
Orbit Automations are a way of creating small workflows that you can use to perform certain actions when a certain criteria is met. It is currently in public beta which means that changes may still be made. If you have any feedback, suggestions or improvements that you would like to see in future, you can let us know about these on our Ideas Board.
Automations Overview
An automation in Orbit is made up of two parts; a trigger, and an action. Triggers are the definition of what Orbit should look out for. Actions are what happens when that Trigger criteria is matched.
Available Triggers
Automations can be triggered on any of the following:
- When a new activity happens
- When a new member is added to the workspace
- When a new note is added to a member
Available Actions
You can associate any of the following actions with the Triggers outlined above:
- Send a notification to a channel in Slack (requires the)Slack App
- Tag a member with a specific tag, or set of tags
Setting up a new Automation
You can find Automations on the Settings page of your Orbit workspace.
To get started creating a new Automation, click the New Automation button.

You will then be taken through a set of steps to set up the trigger, any associated criteria, and the action you want your Automation to perform.
Step 1: Give it a name
All good Automations need a name. Use something descriptive so you can identify what the Automation does when you have lots of them in a list.

Step 2: Choose a Trigger
Next, pick the trigger. Your can choose to trigger your Automation when...
- a new activity is added to a member
- a new member is added to your community
- a new note is added to a member

If you choose a new activity is added to a member you can further filter your criteria to add more specificity to your Trigger:

You can match on any or all of the following filters:
- Activity Types (by Activity Type Key)
- The presence of one or more keywords in the activity description
- Specific tags on a Member profile
Additionally, you can choose to include or exclude your teammate's activities from being included in this Trigger.
Note: If you need to find out which Activity Type Key you should use, you can find all of them listed under Activity Types in your Workspace Settings. They are listed under the Key column.
Step 3: Define your Action
Once your Trigger definition is completed, you need to choose what should happen next. You have a choice of three options:
- Send a webhook [Note: this has now been moved to Settings → Webhooks. Learn more]
- Send a notification in Slack
- Add tags to the member

Send a notification in Slack
If you want to be notified via a channel in your company Slack, this is the Action to use. To set this up you will need to connect your internal Slack workspace to Orbit first by clicking on Connect Slack.

Once connected, you will see a list of available channels. You can choose any channel you want to send the notification to from the dropdown list.

When your Automation runs, any notifications that result from matching criteria in your Trigger will be delivered to the chosen channel, and they look like this:

The notification also includes additional information about the Member, as well as their location, their member tags, and other social profile information if we have it. You can take actions directly from the notification such View Profile, Add Note, and Edit Tags.
Add tags to the Member
Automatically tagging Members when they perform specific actions is really powerful. For example, if you have an event coming up and you want to tag all the members who register interest, this would be the action to use.

You can define one or more tags. They will all be added to the member profile associated with the Trigger.
Step 4: Save it
Click on Create Automation to save everything. It will start working immediately.
Viewing, editing, disabling and deleting Automations
If you want to view, edit, disable or delete an Automation that you have created you can do this by clicking on the Actions button in your main list of Automations.

Automation Details
The details page gives you a complete overview of your Automation including the trigger, action, filters used and a list of recent deliveries so you can see the past few times that it ran and if that run was successful. This is particularly useful when debugging Webhook actions.

Example: Tag members who mention our event in Discord
Below is an example of an automation using Discord, Keyword Matching, and Member Tagging. It aims to do the following:
- Listen to new Discord message activities
- Match the keyword 'Nexus' in any of those messages
- Tag the Member who sent the message with "Nexus Chat"
Nexus is the name of the Orbit User Conference, so we want to tag anyone that mentions it. We can use this tag to create a filtered list of Members in Orbit that have talked about the event ahead of it happening. This list can be stored as a saved view (see

In order to achieve this we use the following settings:
- Trigger is set to a new activity is added to a member.
- Filter using the discord:message:sent activity type
- We check if the Activity Description contains the word "Nexus"
- Our Action is set to add tags to the member
- We specify the tag "Nexus Chat" as the tag we want to add
Useful to know
- You can use multiple activity types in your Trigger, this is useful for checking for the same things across multiple platforms.
- The 'Activity Description' contains the whole message from any messaging platforms such as Discord, Slack or Twitter.
- You can check for multiple keywords in a Trigger, this query is the same as writing 'Keyword 1 OR Keyword 2'.
- Keyword detection is case insensitive, you can use capital letters or lowercase, the automation will match the keyword regardless of the case you use.