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Processes

Create a Process (Walkthrough)

Important: A misconfigured Process can cause many errors and prevent data from saving in your system. Make sure to carefully and correctly set up your Process to prevent data loss. Want help setting up your process? Professional Services can help!
In this example, we'll accomplish two goals:
  • Send an email to any person that responded to an Opportunity.
  • Assign a task to the person responsible for that Opportunity so they can follow up with the person who responded.
  1. Go to Administration > Processes, and click New Process.
  2. Complete the Process fields:
    • Process Name: Response Process.
    • Process Manager: The User responsible for the Process.
    • Active: Leave this set to No until you're done building the Process and are ready to test. If it's set to Yes, unintended problems could occur with incorrect data.
    • Description: When someone submits a Response to an Opportunity, send an email to a respondent and assign a Task to the Primary Contact of the Opportunity.
    • On Submit: You can leave this field blank in our example.
    • On Complete: You can leave this field blank in our example.
    • Trigger Fields: When do you want the Process to run? In this case, we want it to run any time someone creates a Response record and can leave this field blank. But to prevent the Process from firing if we edit the record, we could add "Opportunity_ID" to this text box. That is because Opportunity_ID is a valid field on the Responses page and we want the workflow to fire again if we picked the wrong Opportunity by accident.
    • Dependent Condition: This is the condition that must be True for a Process to fire. In this example, you can leave this blank. This field does not support the Table Lookup Convention.
    • Trigger On Create: Set to Yes if you want this Process to fire when you create a new record.
    • Trigger On Update: Set to Yes if you want this Process to fire when you update an existing record.
    • Table Name: This describes the specific Table in MinistryPlatform that you want the Process to analyze. In our example, we want to do something every time someone responds to an Opportunity and we should choose the Responses Table.
      Note: If we chose the Opportunities Table, the Process would only trigger when someone created a new Opportunity, which is not what we're trying to do.
  3. Click Save.

Next, you can set up your steps.

Set Up Steps

The first step in the Process is to email the person who responded. Then, you'll want the Process to assign a Task to the Opportunity's Primary Contact. Here's how to set up those steps.

  1. Open the Process record you created.
  2. Add the first Step:
    1. On the Steps tab, click New Step.
    2. Complete the Step fields:
      • Step Name: Email Acknowledging Response.
      • Instructions: An email sends within five minutes of someone creating this Task if the person has a valid email address in their Contact record.
      • Order: 1
      • Task Owner/Email From: Specific User. A Specific User field displays.
      • Specific User: Set the specific user account as the sender of this message.
        Tip: Choose a generic account like "Administrator, Church".
      • Step Type: 4. Send an Email.
      • Send Email To: Lookup Contact.
      • Email Template: Select the email template you want to use.
      • Email To Contact : Participant_ID_Table.Contact_ID.
    3. Click Save.
  3. Add the second Step:
    1. On the Steps tab, click New Step.
    2. Complete the Step fields:
      • Step Name: Follow-up on Response.
      • Instructions: A person responded to an Opportunity and you are the designated Contact. Review the response and follow up.
      • Order: 2
      • Task Owner/Email From: Lookup User.
      • Lookup User Field : Participant_ID_Table_Contact_ID_Table.[User_Account].
      • Step Type: 2. Assign a Task.
    3. Click Save.

You can test your Process to ensure you set everything up correctly.

Testing your Process

At this point, you've created the Process record and two associated Step records. Before turning on the Process, you should create a view on the page your Process fires from to test your dependent condition, if applicable. To do this, copy the SQL into the Filter Clause of the SQL view. You shouldn't see any errors when you save the view, and you should only see the records (if any) that match your criteria.

You're ready to set Process to Active to Yes and create a Response record in the Platform. After you receive a Response, you should see a task assigned to the designated Contact from the Opportunity, and email should go to the Participant who created the Response. If you manually create the Response in the Platform, be sure to click the Submit button.

Remember: If there are any issues, turn off the Process right away and start troubleshooting.
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Last updated: October 29, 2024