This guide will walk you through setting up Automations on your Orbit workspace.

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 our Slack App)
• Tag a member with a specific tag, or set of tags
• Send to a Webhook

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
• Send a notification in Slack
• Add tags to the member

Send a webhook

Sending a webhook allows you to connect Orbit activity to just about any other service. You could use this in association with a tool like Zapier to add information to your internal systems such as HubSpot, or Salesforce, or trigger a series of emails to be sent from Marketo, or to email a link to a data capture form in Typeform. The possibilities are endless when you use this trigger.

To set it up, you need to supply the Webhook URL. This is the destination URL that we will send our payload to when this Automation is triggered.

For additional security, we recommend using the Webhook Secret. This can be any random string you define as long as it is 20 characters or more. This will be passed in the headers as x-orbit-signature so you can check for it on the receiving end and be certain that the data being sent is coming from your Automation and not a bad actor of some kind.

The signature is a SHA-256 encrypted hash of the entire JSON payload we send with the request, and only your secret can be used to decrypt this.

The body of the JSON payload is made up the Activity being performed, and the Member information associated with it.

‍

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 that we can come back to and see new additions at any time.

In order to achieve this we use the following settings:

1. Trigger is set to a new activity is added to a member.
2. Filter using the discord:message:sent activity type
3. We check if the Activity Description contains the word "Nexus"
4. Our Action is set to add tags to the member
5. 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.