Transcript for "Smarter Workflows: Enhancing Operational Efficiency & Donor Relationships":
Welcome, everybody. I see a few people joining in the, countdown here, so we'll just give a few more minutes to allow as many people as possible to join before we jump in. Alright. I think we're gonna go ahead and get started. We might have a few more join, but that's alright. So I'll start by sharing our, slideshow here. So welcome to the July, dedication and action workshop. We are gonna be talking this month about smarter workflows, and how they can enhance operational efficiency as well as your donor relationships with your donors. So as we get started, we are going to cover just a couple housekeeping things. So let me get this. There we go. So first of all, I see quite a number of you messaging in the chat already, which is awesome. And so you'll notice there's that chat tab to the right of your screen, and that is open, invisible to everyone in the session. So feel free to chat in there, as we're going through the session. Next to it is a little q and a tab. So if you switch over to that, you can ask a private and direct question, to the donor direct team and to Ministry Brands. Be aware we might publish your question, when we answer it, but you can post questions in there either with your name or anonymously. And then, of course, we are recording this session, so we will send out that recording tomorrow, along with a resource, which I'll talk a little bit about towards the end. So I get my mouse to work here. There we go. For those of you that, might not know me yet, my name is Nicole Hicks, and I work at donor direct, and I've been on the implementation team for just over seven years. So quite a lot of time here. And in that time, my primary role is to onboard new ministries. So some of you I might have already worked with. And then some of the other things that I do is augment staff, work with existing clients on projects, and do training and on-site audits and a lot of other things. So even if you've been with Donor Direct longer than myself, I might still have worked with you and, done some sort of project. So for our session today, we're gonna cover, workflows, as I mentioned, and we're gonna break that down by looking at workflow types. There's two different types we'll look at. Workflow criteria, so what can you use in the system in order to trigger your workflows, and then workflow actions. What can workflows actually do once those triggers are met? And then as I mentioned, we have that q and a tab. So assuming there's time at the end, we might cover those publicly, or we might just, answer them as we go through the session. And then, of course, we'll have some key takeaways towards the end here. So as we get started, we like to get, just some feedback from you all, who've taken time out of your day to join us. And, we're gonna do a little bit of a poll. Let me turn that on here. And we just wanna know currently, what or does your ministry use workflows in SE? So on the right hand side of the chat and the QAR, you'll see a new tab called poll. And so if you guys will open that up, we'd like to get some responses from you. I'll give you just a minute to vote. Okay. Just another couple seconds, and then we will close that poll and see how you all voted. Alrighty. So it looks like, our highest percentage is that, you have a few basic workflows. Oh, actually, sorry. I have something. So you use workflows either for a variety of processes or just a few basic workflows. So that's good. We like to know that our ministries are using workflows. And even if you have workflows that you're using now, you might find as we're going through this session that there are workflows that we talk about today or that trigger ideas in your mind of, oh, maybe I can use workflows and do this or that. So back to our slide here. Just a quick definition of what workflows are. So we're calling them behind the scenes automated actions that are triggered by defined events in SE or studio enterprise. So, basically, what that means is a workflow is something that, first of all, has to have a defined event or something that can trigger the action, and then it's an action that happens automatically in the system when that defined event happens. So if we look at workflows, there are different users that can benefit from them. The first group or type of users is gonna be your end users, your business user users, basically, your ministry staff that's logging into Studio Enterprise UI. And so these might be users that want information generated for them out of the system so they don't have to go hunt for it. Right? They might be, might need a list of donors that have made certain amounts of donations recently or, a list of people that are signed up for an event or different things, so that they don't have to go look for it. It's just supplied automatically to them, and then they can move on, with doing the work of the ministry, with that data that's given to them from the automatic workflow. The other kind of user that benefits from workflows is your system admin or your technical users. So what I find sometimes, as I'm doing implementations or audits or different things, is a lot of times the end users know what they want, but they don't know how to get it. And so it's the system admin or the technical users that are going into Studio Enterprise or even the back end of SQL and running queries or pulling lists or advanced find or using ways in the system to pull that information for end users to, to use. Well, a lot of times that is a manual process where it's a one off request, but it can also be a recurring request. Like, hey. At the beginning of the month, I want this list. And so workflows can automate those processes that are maybe manual right now where you're looking things up. It you could actually set it as a query to where it automatically pull that data, send a list or a queue or do different actions with that workflow with that information. So it free up time for system admin users, so they're not constantly trying to pull that data and manipulate it and send it out to the end users. And then, of course, and arguably most important would be the donor group. So let's say you have a donor that, makes a large donation. Well, they wanna know that the ministers received that donation, and they wanna know that it's appreciated. Right? And so workflows can watch the system and let users know quickly when certain things happen in the system, so that those users can then go and contact those donors and interact with them and build that relationship with them. So we're gonna do one more poll here. And we just wanna know you as an individual user, how familiar are you with the ins and outs of workflows? I'll give you just a minute here to answer those questions. Okay. Those numbers have stopped moving, so we'll go ahead and close that poll and share our results. There we go. So I find this to be very interesting. We have a pretty even mix, of users on the call right now. Some of you are familiar with workflows and you build them. Some of you don't use them at all, and then some of you use them but don't set them up yourself. So that's helpful, to know because as I'm doing the demo here in just a minute, one of the things that you'll see is examples of workflows. So for some of those users that either don't use workflows or just use the output, it might trigger you to think of, oh, that'd be a really cool thing for me to use. I'd love that output, or I'd love something similar to that, but maybe a little bit more tailored to what you do. And those that build workflows, you might see a different action that you haven't used before, that might trigger, oh, that would be really cool to use that. So with that, let's go ahead and jump into the live demo. Let me share my screen here. Okay. Perfect. So we have four workflows that we're gonna go through today. This first one is a large donation workflow. So this is the most common workflow that I see, that's set up a lot, especially for new ministries as they're being onboarded. So what this workflow does is it's a monitored workflow. So it's looking at the table to run and trigger whenever an action actually happens. This particular workflow is looking at the t o one transaction master. So that's our transaction table. And this is where it is helpful to have a little bit of technical acumen or understand the SQL database when you're setting up workflows. Because in order to know what output file you want, you need to know what criteria is going to produce that output, and you need to know where that criteria lives in the database so you can set up your workflow correctly. So in most environments, we have a default of 10 tables, as a monitored entity. You can add others here. So there's a lot more tables in the database, and you can monitor other tables as well. And so if the table you're wanting to monitor is not in this list, it requires knowing the table name, and setting it up and configuring it in Studio Enterprise. So this is where sometimes, end users have a hard time with workflows and and setting them up because they know what they want. It's just the default drop down values here aren't the right input that they need to get their output. And so there's that. But then the other thing is and it's very important to know, one we've seen quite a lot. Even though you select the entity table here to monitor, if that table in the database on the SQL Server does not have change tracking turned on, the workflow is never gonna work. The server needs to give permission to the UI to monitor that table, and then that is accomplished through change tracking. So going back this workflow here, all of that's already been done. We're monitoring the t o one. I'm looking for new inserts to this table. So I could also look for changes or deletions. But for this one, I just want anytime a new donation, comes into the system, I wanted to evaluate that to see if it matches the criteria below. So our criteria, even though we're looking for transactions, we're always gonna start or it's best practice to start with the a o one. The reason you wanna start with the a o one as your entity, is because that gives you the most options down in your actions section. So we started with our a o one, and we're joining from our a o one to our transaction master and then from our transaction master to our gift details table. So what that's doing is it's saying, okay. When it is looking at the transactions, it's only going to look at accounts that have a transaction on it and that also that transaction is a gift or a donation. Right? So if there are accounts in here and the transaction comes through, but that transaction is an order or an event registration, or any of the other kinds of, transactions, it's going to ignore that transaction for this workflow. So it's only looking at ones that then also exist in the gift detail table. And then I wanna know when it when that gift detail is created, is the donation amount, the one time donation, greater than or equal to $5,000? So that's all the input for the workflow. And then we wanna talk about what can the workflow do once that criteria is met. So you'll see there's four different tasks here, or actions, and a workflow can have just one. If you just want a notification when something happens just so that somebody knows it happens, you don't need to really do anything with it, then a notification works really well. So a notification, is just it's a type. You can deliver it different ways. So system means there's a place in the system you'll go look for it in SE, or it can be an email or a text message. There is some configuration around the email and the text message integrations. You have to make sure those are set up or if you won't actually send, but those are options for delivery. Then you can decide who's gonna receive that notification. So you can see a whole host of examples here. I won't go into the details of all of them in this session, but we're just pulling it for a single accessor or user in the system, and we're saying that that's me. So whenever this large donation comes in, I want to get a notification. And then down towards the bottom is what is the content of that notification. So you can see these squiggly brackets here, in all these places. That's a merge field. So it's pulling in details from the transaction and including it in the notification to me when it sends it. So if I switch hats for just a moment from my workflow configuration and think of I'm now a donor dev dev officer, what I would do is I'd come in at the beginning of my workday and come directly to my workplace to my notifications, look for unread system notifications, and then here is the output of that workflow that we just looked at. So there's two donations in here, that happened yesterday that are $5,000 each. So they meet that $5,000 or more criteria. So then I can do things with it. I can go look at the account, and and go from there or mark it as red if I don't need to do anything with it. So switching back and going to our workflow again, just opening it up and edit. The other actions, you can add an assignment to the account. So let's say with this large donation, we know that this donor is now invested in the mission of the Ministry Brands. And so we wanna pay attention to them, and we want someone to cultivate a relationship with them and work with them. So we're going to assign a user to this donor, to kind of move through whatever the internal process is and work with them. So it's pretty simple. It's just you're picking the user, picking the functional category, and then whether it's a primary, assignment on the account or just another one if they're already assigned. Another option is adding codes to the accounts. So with the assignment, a donor dev office officer can say, give me a list of all of the accounts assigned to me. But maybe you want everyone in the Ministry Brands to know when that donor is assigned to someone, or fits certain criteria. So in this one, we have a donor level with a value of major, on as a code type in the system and code value. And so whenever this criteria in the workflow is met, it's going to add this code to the account. And then our last one here is build communication. So let's say we don't wanna wait for the donation receipt to go out because this is such a large donation. We wanna recognize that donor as quickly as possible. So we're going to create a phone task on this donor account in order to do that. Now you can add different, types of communications. You can see the list here. I won't go into the details of each one of those. So for this example, we're just gonna do a phone call, and I'm gonna assign it to myself again. It's gonna be in an open status. So this is open, meaning I still have to do something with it. And then we just have a generic subject line in here to indicate what this phone call is supposed to be about. So we're gonna back all the way out of our workflow, and I'm switching hats again. So I'm a donor development officer, and I wanna go see what phone tasks do I have assigned to myself. So I'm gonna switch to my workplace, my activities, and then by default, it's open. So I'm just gonna do a search here. And I can see that I have two phone task or open communications assigned to me. So if I click on one of these, I can see information about it. The account number, you can see the hyperlink, date. You do notice that the donation amount is not in here. So the open communication does require a little bit of research, on the transaction. The transaction details aren't here. But we have this lovely list of actions. So if this is a donor that you recognize and you work with them a lot and you call them a lot, and they maybe they make monthly donations and you don't necessarily want to call them again this month, you can either mark it as completed or mark it as canceled, and that just moves it off of your my activities list. If you wanna research the donor because you don't recognize them, you can go to my account. That'll take you over to the donor's account. You can look, at the information there and, go on. If it is a donor that you're familiar with, and you haven't talked to them in a while and you wanna take that extra step, you can click go to communication. That's what I'm gonna do here. And it takes me to the account as well, but directly to that communication And so then I can click edit. It gives me the phone numbers for that donor so I can call them, you know, right here while I'm in this communication record. And then whenever I'm done with that conversation, I would mark it as completed and put a note in here about the conversation and mark it as saved. So now you can see it's completed or closed. And if I go back to my activities and refresh, they're gone from my list here. So, those are common donor development actions that you'll see from workflows. We're gonna go back to workflows now and look at some other things that you can do. So our next one is a donor development team queue. So let's say instead of a triggered or monitored workflow, I wanna list once a month of donors that meet a certain criteria. So in this example, I want it to give me any any donor that has a summarized or cumulative donation of, a thousand dollars or more, in the last, month. Right? Yes. So this workflow is gonna run sorry. My scroll keeps there we go. This workflow is gonna run on the schedule that's set up here in the middle. So I want it to run on the twenty fourth of every month at 11:02 or maybe the first of the month at 7AM so it's running and ready when you get into work, whatever schedule you want it to run. It could also run daily, once a week, so you can see once a year. Lots of different options here. Then the action, when it finds this and runs it, is going to be building a queue. So you can see the setup on the action is fairly simple. You're just going to name the queue, tell it what kind of processing it is. I've optionally added a script to this queue. You can add category if you create a lot of queues, different things like that. So when this runs, the output looks like, this. So we're gonna go to accounts and transactions, queue processing, and I'm just gonna search for open queues. And you can see that there's this one here, thousand dollars from the last month. So we have three donors that have given, a thousand dollars in the last month, that matched that criteria and showed up here. Now one thing that is important to understand with workflows versus maybe doing this query and segmentation is that workflows, don't have the ability to do exclusions. So if you wanted this queue to be built based on they've given a thousand dollars in the last month, and we, have not communicated with them recently. We don't have a way of doing a negative search of you have not contacted them recently, so they don't have a communication in the workflow itself. So you would have to go and use segmentation for that. So side note, if you're signed up for conference, I'm actually presenting all three of the segmentation breakout sessions. So I'll be covering some of those details and exclusion groups in, those sessions. So make sure to sign up for them. They're gonna be fun. Then we're gonna go look at our next queue here or I'm sorry, workflow. So our next example is segmentation build orders. So, again, this one is a scheduled workflow, and you can see this one is weekly set to run every Wednesday at 08:45AM. But you'll notice something a little different on the criteria. So the criteria you see just says last name equals Hicks. The reason being is that for certain actions on workflows, the action is not driven based on the results of the criteria. It's driven based on just that the workflow ran, and then the action does all of the work. So for certain kinds of scheduled workflows, you want to set your criteria to be something that's always true, but that's not going to give you a million results. You want it to have just a handful of results. So in this case, there's only four accounts in the system with the last name of Hicks. And so this one is going to always trigger because those four accounts will exist, assuming no one deletes them. And then once that once it finds those true accounts or that true criteria, the action does the rest of the work. So in this case, the action is we have, a special project code, accounting project code that we're doing as a temp, you know, project, and we're trying to get donors to donate to the special project. And for donors that do donate, we wanna send out a gift, once a week to those donors just as a thank you for, supporting and fulfilling the the needs of that special project. So we can link our workflows to segmentation, in limited circumstances with that caveat. So the first action on this workflow is to actually run a job, a segmentation job that's already been created. So it exists, over in segmentation. And, essentially, this job is looking for first, it's pulling out exclusions, and then it's looking for anyone that's made a donation to this special project, in the last week. So the first action is simple. It's just running the job to get the updated list of accounts. Our next action is then building orders for that job. So the results from that job, in segment number 10, anyone that's in that segment, we want to build an order transaction on the account with this free product, and send it out to those donors, so that they can, you know just as a thank you for donating to that project. Let me cancel here. Go to our last workflow. So our last workflow is, called custom SQL, and it's a fun one. It's actually a real world example that we've done recently for a client, But it's also a little bit of a teaser to give you an idea of how powerful workflows can be as a tool in Studio Enterprise. So let's walk through it. First, you see this one is set as a scheduled workflow. It's running on Mondays at 07:45. And, again, we have our always true but small results criteria here. So we just want something that's gonna trigger this workflow. Then in this one, we click edit here, our action is, run custom SQL. So we have a custom, stored procedure that's been placed on the database that's going to run when this workflow schedule kicks off. And the scenario for this one is, there is a control record in Studio Enterprise that triggers preventing duplicate emails from being added to the system. So if an email already exists in SE, it will not be you can't save it again on any other account in the system. It's a required control record if you're using one of the email marketing integrations like Mailchimp or HubSpot or Silverpop. What we found is when we turn that on, most ministries opt to move their email addresses from family accounts to the spouse accounts because they want each spouse to be part of, their email marketing and to receive emails, independently. Well, because the email exists on the spouse account, but the transactions roll up to the family account, if the ministry is doing email receipts, that causes problems because the family account, often then doesn't have an email address. So even though there's emails on members of the family, it's not on the family account itself. So if your letter codes are set up right to still assign email letter code, what this stored procedure does is it looks for any emails that are stuck in the v o eight table. So if you know SQL, that's the table that sends out the notifications and emails. It looks for anything that's stuck in that table, and it looks through it and reviews it to see if it's a family account missing an email address. If it is, it looks at the spouse accounts to see if there's an email on one of the spouses, and then it replaces the family account in the v o eight with the spouse account number. So that then that stuck email, instead of being sent to the family, gets released and sent out to one of the family members. So this is just one of many examples we could have used, but it gives you an idea of what custom SQL can do, in the system. Okay. So with that, we will end our live demo here and move back to our slideshow. Okay. So key takeaways, from those workflows. First of all, it's important to understand the purpose of workflows in SE, and to understand what they can do, and to understand if workflows is really the tool that you want to use for what you're trying to do or if it is, maybe a different process in the system like segmentation or advanced find or maybe something like decline rules already exists. So you need to understand the purpose of workflows. Then you also need to understand the purpose, of what you individually or your ministry needs to use it for. So you need to define clearly what your criteria is, what the input is, and what the desired output would be. So those two things together will determine if workflows will actually be the tool you need to use, in order to accomplish this or if you need to explore other options in SC. K? And then, of course, the last one, which you might have picked up on as I went through it, it does require a little bit of technical acumen when you're setting up workflows. You need to make sure that you have, some knowledge of the database structure so that you understand what criteria options are available. And then you also need to understand, or have I'm sorry. Have access to the SQL Server in order to actually set up and do the things that you need to do with the workflow. Okay? So as we are close to opening up our q and a session, we would love to hear, a survey from you guys. We wanna know if these sessions are helpful, if this one in particular was helpful, if you've learned anything, or if there's any other kind of topics that you would be interested in us doing in future sessions. So I think that has been turned on, and, yeah, looks like it. And I'll give you guys time to answer those questions. Okay. The other thing is that we mentioned in the beginning, we have a resource that we're gonna hand out. And so tomorrow when we send out the recording, we're gonna include a document called key student enterprise workflows that will change your day. So it includes some examples in addition to the ones we talked about today of workflows that we have seen other ministries use, as well as some of those tips and tricks that we have learned the hard way on what not to do when you're setting up your workflow, because we've learned that sometimes if you don't set up your workflow correctly, it causes more chaos than not having a workflow at all. And so if your ministry, or users at your ministry don't have the SQL or system system admin knowledge to build your own workflows, that is something we can partner with you on as well. And so there's information on that later on. So with that, we're gonna open up the q and a, which I'm hoping you all have been posting in there as we went. Okay. So let me see if there's any that haven't been answered yet. Perfect. It looks like they've all been answered. Oh, I'm just looking through. There's some great questions in here. Okay. So I think one just came in. No. Okay. One thing I have seen is that, because workflows cannot do negative searches, but segmentation can do exclusion groups, and there are certain segmentation actions that can be combined with workflows, I've seen people ask if you can run a segmentation job from a workflow. So trigger it and run it from workflow on a schedule, but then do additional actions. So let me share my screen again and just show you. Because I have to stop sharing the slide. So let's go back to our segmentation build order. So let's say on this one, instead of, running the job and then building orders, we wanted to run the job and then, build a queue based on this. So you'll see when you do your drop downs of actions, there's only the two links to segmentation that are an option here. One is just running the job, and then the other is building the orders. So if you need to use any of the other segmentation actions like, building a queue or something like that, or managing codes or whatnot based on the segmentation, with the exclusions, you have to go and do that in segmentation itself. So even though you have build queue and manage codes and some of the other things here, they're the same actions and workflows and in segmentation. But if I add build queue here, what it's gonna do is it's gonna build the queue based on the workflow criteria. So that queue is gonna ignore the segmentation run job, and it's only gonna build a queue with those four accounts that have last name of Hicks. So it's another reason why you need to understand what these actions actually do, because if you combine them in a certain way, they might not produce the output that you are expecting. Okay. Let's see. Do we have any new q and a's in here? Oh, good, Trish. I'm glad you found some inspiration to create some workflows. Oh, perfect. Yes. That one is the one I just went through, since we can't do negative searches in workflows. Yeah. Oh, perfect. Here's another one. So can multiple workflows run at the same time, or do they need to run consecutively? Okay. So the short answer is they can run at the same time as long as they are different workflows. So you can't have the same workflow, kick off, and then while it's running, kick off again. But running too many workflows at the same time might cause system performance issues. So that's something you'll wanna keep in mind, as you're doing your workflows and something you might wanna partner with us on to, efficiently build your workflows to make sure that, even though it's a really great tool and can do a lot of really good things, you don't want it to bog down the system by using it too much and, and slowing down your server. K. So let's see here. Can you access related account info? When a donor gets through DAP, the related account is more important to us. So you can use the related account as criteria. It depends on what action you're wanting to do with that. If you're just wanting notifications, then that would be fairly easy to set up. You'd have to add the related account information, or the right table to the to the query, list. But if you're wanting to then do something, or, like, output the the DAF transactions, then that might require something like a custom SQL output, to do something like that. Okay. That was a good question. Okay. I'm not seeing any new questions. Alright. Well, let me go back to our slide then. We have one final, just information. So if you do need help, or have workflow questions, we would love to help you. So you can reach out to us at donnerdirect@ministrybrands.com, or there's a QR code here on the screen, that will get you, access to a free workflow consultation. And that would be just talking through some workflow ideas if it, gets into actually setting up a workflow, then that would be more of a project where we have to work with you and partner with you. But if you have just some general questions or ideas or you wanna know, hey. I have this workflow idea, and I wanna know if if if workflow is really the best thing. Or if we need to use something else in the system, then you can sign up there. And I don't see any more questions. So we're gonna go ahead and give you guys back some time in your day. I hope this was helpful, and, yeah, hope to see you at conference.