How you can create an automation in Zapier | The Data Coach | #data education and consulting

Transcript:

Lindsay: [00:00:00] Hi everyone. My name is Lindsay. I'm The Data Coach, and, today I'm gonna show you an example of how you can create automations in Zapier to improve your data quality and save yourself some time. Now, this video was not sponsored by Zapier. They do not know that I exist, and that is fine.

This is simply the tool that I use to help me manage the data in my business, and I hope that it could help do the same for your nonprofit.

If you're new here, hi. Welcome, our goal here at The Data Coach is to help nonprofit organizations better organize, analyze, and use their data to achieve their missions.

One of the ways that we do that is by providing free content here on this YouTube channel. So if you find this tutorial helpful, please subscribe to help us build our growing community.

Okay, let's get to it.

One of the biggest challenges that nonprofits face is that we're all using a thousand different systems [00:01:00] to store our data, and more often than not, those systems can't share information with each other.

So if there's an email address that needs to be updated in your donor database, it might also need to be updated in the volunteer spreadsheet, and then also wherever you're keeping your email marketing list and maybe even a list of upcoming event attendees.

That can mean a lot of extra work for staff that they could be spending doing other things,

and you also run the risk of having incorrect duplicate or outdated data and maybe no idea which system has the most correct information. One of the ways that we can address this issue is by setting up APIs, or application programming interfaces, using tools like Zapier.

What's great about these automations is that, A, you don't need to be a computer scientist or programmer to set them up, and B, what they do is act as a bridge between software programs [00:02:00] that normally don't talk to each other and allow them to share information with one another. So here's an example of how I set up an automation to keep my email list accurate and updated without me having to do any extra work.

Here is a signup form that I put together in Google Forms that allows people to sign up for our monthly newsletter. Now, when I create monthly newsletters, I do everything in this program called MailerLite. So all the email addresses of the people who signed up all live in this system.

What I would like to have happen is that when somebody signs up for our newsletter in this Google Form, I want Google Forms to automatically send the email address over to MailerLite. Now, Google Forms and MailerLite normally don't talk to each other, so what I need to do is set up an API so that these two programs can share information with each [00:03:00] other, so I'm gonna show you how I do that in Zapier.

This is what the Zapier homepage looks like. To get started, we're gonna click on Zap. It's what they call these. We're gonna put in a name for our Zap, which will be email address signups. Now you can start by putting some instructions in Zapier's co-pilot AI system, and it will shoot out what it thinks you want, but I'm gonna show you how to do this manually.

So the first thing I'm gonna do is click on Trigger. So since we're starting here with Google Form, go ahead and click on. Now I have to choose an event, and in this case I have two options, a new form response or a new or updated form response. I'm gonna go with new [00:04:00] so that whenever a new person puts their information into my Google form, Zapier will get started.

Now I have to tell Zapier which form I'm talking about because I have more than one. We're gonna choose the newsletter signup. It's gonna ask if you could test the trigger. So it's gonna try to find some recent form responses and pull them to make sure everything is set up correctly. We'll do test trigger form response A, I just put in my email address recently,

that all looks good to me. We can go ahead and continue with that record. Now, it's gonna automatically throw you into step two. Step two is going into MailerLite. So I'm gonna click MailerLite Action Event. What do I want MailerLite to do once it has an email address? Well, what I wanted to do is create or update a subscriber.

So I'm gonna choose that .

Now what this is about in the configuration step is matching up fields [00:05:00] in my Google Forms to the fields that exist in MailerLite. So subscriber group is, where do I want this email address to live? Well, I have two subscriber groups set up in MailerLite. One is for people who sign up via the website and the other through the Google form.

So I'll choose Google form. Email address. In the Google form, in question number two, I ask for email address. That's the information that needs to go into the email field in MailerLite. So I choose that.

MailerLite lists an organization as a company. In my Google Form, I have organization name . Those two mean the same thing. So we'll just click on that so that they matchup, and then name in MailerLite is going to be linked with your name in my Google form. Now I can continue.

This is essentially telling me what the instructions look like and it's pulling from that example record of when I put in my email address from before. So there's an email [00:06:00] field, my email, everything else is gonna be empty 'cause I didn't put anything in there. What I can do now is test the step.

A subscriber was sent to MailerLite in about zero seconds. So what that means is this little automation that I set up is successful and when I'm ready, just go ahead, publish, and then I don't have to do anything else. Zapier is gonna do all of the work for me.

That's it on creating an automation in Zapier. There is a free account option along with paid plans, so you can choose what works best for your organization. There are also alternatives to Zapier, like Make, Give Butter, and If This, Then That. I'm not as familiar with those systems, but I will try to remember to leave links to them down below, test them out, give them a try.

Figure out what's gonna work best for you.

Was this tutorial helpful for you? Do you have ideas on how you can use this tool to create automations for your organization? Please let me know [00:07:00] down in the comments, and thank you so much for watching. Until next time, bye.