Favourite Zapier + Slack automations

Hi @KrisGoose 

Thank you for opening this topic. Zaps are a big part of keeping your community going for sure.

I can say we have a slack channel for new topics. A new topic is created in the community and it is posted in Slack. This helps get all eyes on any issues and questions where we may be able to help.

I am also in talks with our support team about regular examples we can template-a-size for sharing in inSpired.

I will also call on @DannyPancratz , @SmartlyGreg , @bas , @Idan , @tiffany.oda , -0@Daniele Cmty and @Chris Anderson to add any useful tips they may have! 

@Alistair FIeld my pleasure good sir! I always love a good “best practice” share thread, so with my community launch coming in a few weeks I’d love to have notifications in our company slack ready to go via zapier!

My piece of advice here is to work backwards from the thing you wish you had. Zapier is great at extending Insided functionality and customizing alerts (especially with Slack) to your needs/interests. 

The reason my advice is to work backwards is there’s a lot more you can do with Zapier that isn’t obvious with the existing Triggers and actions. You can automate just about anything in the Insided API using Zapier. Webhooks provide many more triggers you can work with. And other API calls allow you to create more actions you’d like to do. It will cost you a few more zap runs with multi-part Zaps, but it’s possible to layer some things together for really cool results. 

But as somewhere simpler to start, I like: 

• A slack channel for every new question / topic to give you and others real-time visibility into activity. 
• Custom slack alerts based on specific tags or keywords in the Title/body of a post. 
• A notification for new user sign ups (shout out to @tiffany.oda for a medium post that inspired that one) -- I didn’t think I needed it, but the visibility is great. Plus it’s easy moderation of usernames. If you see every user name as it’s created, you can address any that might be inappropriate. Plus, as Tiffany put in her blog post, that alert is great for stakeholder management and engaging the team: each new sign-up is a win you can celebrate or anecdote you can reference (I’ve been seeing a lot of sign ups from company abc lately)

More complex stuff I’ve started doing: 

• New topics + delay + api call to check replies + slack post = escalation for moderators/experts to address questions that the community didn’t get to
• A much more complicated version of that: 
  

  • How to use Webhooks and Zapier (or another API tool) to improve your reply rate
• And not sure I have a post on it, but our gamification strategy often awards points and badges for certain activities (speaking on a webinar). So I have a few zaps based on a google sheet that makes this easy: 
  • Add their email and select their activity
  • API finds their user ID based on email
  • Award points action
  • Award the badge action

And my latest: 

• There's an API operation for Checking User Points within a certain time frame ... so I built an app for our Users to do that on their own

Very well said @DannyPancratz !

Hi ​@DannyPancratz was wondering if you knew how to set up the emoji react to reply to a thread in slack. I copied a zap template from Gainsight but am getting lost at a couple of steps here. I’ve attached screenshots below. While it says I have completed the filter conditions tab, I only took my best guess, asking Zap to filter by the reaction containing the text for the emoji. I am not sure how to configure with find topic via modertaor tag either. 

 

From what you shared, you probably don’t need the Find topic by moderator tag. And that’s what seems to be tripping you up. 

And you may not need to find a user either, if you’re just replying to a post (unless if you’re looking up the userId for whoever added the emoji reaction). 

If what you want is emoji reaction = preset reply, this is what you’ll need. 

1. Emoji reaction trigger
2. Formatter steps to parse the data from the slack message the emoji was added to
   1. This assumes things like the the topic URL is in the slack message
   2. Use the Zapier Formatter utility to pull out what you need for the API call, for example the topicId #
3. Create a reply

If you need steps in the middle that look up the the actual post, don’t use the prebuilt Zapier aciton for look up via Moderator Tag. Unless there’s a moderator tag you can find it by, that won’t help. Unfortunately there’s not Find topic by {anything other than moderator tag} step. However, you can do that via the API. To do that, use the API Request (beta) action and then the GET call for Find a question/conversation by Id. 

​@DannyPancratz Thank you so much. You really helped here. I’ll try this and hopefully it works!

​@DannyPancratz Got it working but its formatting super strangely. Do you know how to get the reply to be posted with only the text in the reply of the thread?

That looks like you’re giving the Create Reply action a lot more data than just what you want to reply. Use a formatted step or two to isolate only what you need. 
 

also that action will accept html, so you could pass along html formatted replies if you’d like. You’d need steps to convert slack formatting to html. 

​@DannyPancratz The thing thats confusing me is that I do not think I am giving the create reply data that much info. I only set that section to contain the post replies text as seen below: 

 

Reply content field on contains “Thread replies text”

Try using one of these options instead

• Message Text
• Message Raw Text