Is anyone else out there obsessed with automating every corner of your community platform? ‍♂️ I’m all-in on streamlining processes using tools like Workato, Google Apps Script, and Python to make community operations smarter, faster, and more scalable.

Here’s a peek at how we’ve extended our setup to do just that — and some of the behind-the-scenes automation magic that makes it all work.

🧠 Custom Roles That Assign Themselves (Yes, Really)

Our community structure is centered on lines of business and product access, with custom roles managing visibility and permissions. Manual assignment just doesn’t scale — so we automated it entirely.

When a user registers, a community webhook fires.

A Workato recipe catches that webhook and:

• Parses the user's email domain

• Queries Salesforce for the associated Account and its Lines of Business

• Dynamically builds a list of roles based on what that user should be entitled to

🧩 The final step? An API call to the community platform that assigns those roles to the user — in real time — via a POST /user/{userId}/role endpoint.

No one touches a spreadsheet. No admin panel. It just happens.

Daily Dashboards with Google Sheets + Apps Script

Every night, a Google Apps Script triggers and pulls the latest user + role data from the community platform into Google Sheets using authenticated API calls (GET /user or GET /user/email/{email}).

From there:

• Leadership dashboards update automatically to show new registrations, login activity, and user health trends

• Mismatch-check tabs compare Salesforce entitlements to actual assigned roles

• A cleanup column flags users whose role assignments are out of sync

For mass updates, a Python script reads the mismatch sheet and sends API requests to correct roles in bulk using endpoints like POST /user/bulk/role and DELETE /user/bulk/role.

One click = fixed.

Slack as a Front Door for CSMs

We turned Slack into a self-service interface for Customer Success.

CSMs submit a simple form with the user’s email. A Google Apps Script catches the submission event and:

• Looks up the user via the community’s API

• Sends a bulk delete of all roles via DELETE /user/bulk/role

• Applies the "Deactivated" role via POST /user/bulk/role

• Replaces the user's primary role with "roles.banned" via POST /user/{userId}/role

All of this happens in seconds — no logging into an admin dashboard, and the action is logged and confirmed in Slack.

️ Tools I Use (and Love):

• Workato: for real-time workflows and system-to-system automation

• Google Apps Script: for daily syncs, Slack integration, and bridging Sheets to APIs

• Python: for bulk data operations, cleanup logic, and deeper analytics

Automation has taken our community operations from reactive to proactive — and it’s unlocked whole new layers of scale and flexibility. Honestly? It’s just more fun to work this way.

Are you automating parts of your community workflows? Would love to hear how others are leveraging APIs, workflows, and scripting to make life easier for everyone involved.