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EA Global Tech Notes
How the backend magic works for EA Global. Answer: lots of Zapier glue and a goddamn monster of a spreadsheet. I recommend you read the whole Application Story regardless of what you're working on, and then focus on the how-to of your specific piece.
This is the overview of how a user (you!) goes from starting to apply to arriving at the conference.
- Typeform: You find a typeform from wherever you get your EA news. You fill out the typeform with all your hopes and dreams. Typeform pings Zapier (zap here), which takes the data, cleans it and puts it in a spreadsheet. We never look at the typeform responses on their site.
- EAG Spreadsheet: Now your data is in the giant EA Global application spreadsheet. This is less of a spreadsheet and more of a mini-custom webapp. We take advantage of the data validation option in google sheets to create the dropdowns you see. These dropdowns are key to the sheet being stable enough to give to users, without forcing them to type exact phrases. Conditional formatting makes it easy to see at a glance which applicants have been accepted / reviewed and which still need attention.
- Decision: Julia or someone she trusts reviews the spreadsheet and makes an admission decision. When she's ready to pull the trigger, she sets the "Confirm Email" column to match the decision (double confirmation, yay!). We'll say she likes you and you've been admitted, so she sets it to "Send Accept email". This column is watched by Zapier and triggers a zap.
- Zapier: The acceptance zap triggers every time no matter what the column change was and gets the entire row. First checks that the "Confirm Email" is "Send Accept email" and that the "Decision" column is "Accept" and only continues if this condition is met. Then the zap adds you to a MailChimp List.
- Mailchimp: ...Where an Automation Campaign immediately fires an email to you inviting you to register. The automation will send reminder emails 3 and 6 days later reminding you to register.
- Registration
You then click on the bizzabo link and pay us money, register, etc. 4 things now happen.
- The application spreadsheet is updated with your status marked as attending.
- You are added to the drip campaign for theme emails, once that's setup.
- An invoice is added to xero, so we are accounting for your ticket.
- You are unsubscribed from emails reminding you to register.
- Other things that could happen
- Referrals: TODO
- Notify not attending: You could decide that you don't want to go and email us about it. In order to not be rude, we should stop sending you reminder emails. The person handling your message would put "Notified not attending" to "TRUE" and a zap would unsubscribe you from the accepted list.
Suppose you want to send emails to accepted EAG London applicants.
Seems to be done by not-tech.
There should be lots of copying (manually unfortunately, I think) of previous zaps. See the links above for what to copy paste. A couple of things to note though.
- There should be a folder for each EA Global Don't create the zaps in your own home folder. Create a folder in the CEA space for your EA Global if one doesn't exist and make the zaps there.
- Testing and troubleshooting
- Make liberal use of the Task History that Zapier offers.
- Can manually run from the dashboard, instead of waiting for 5 minutes for it to poll google and notice the change.
- When adding new subscribers in MailChimp you need to select the list first, before you'll see the name fields.
Create a new list here. Katie Glass has historically been the "From name", [email protected] is the "From email address". Reuse a "remind people how they singed up to your list" from EAG SF. Dunno if you need to Enable GDPR fields.
You want a create new campaign, and select automated and custom, or use this link. Once you choose your list, you'll be sent to the creation wizard page. First edit the trigger. Change the trigger to be List management > Sign up. On the next page select delay: immediately and select "Trigger when subscribers are imported." Now click design your email. I trust you to choose a good subject etc on the Email Information page. Select Saved templates > Very Plain Text + CEA Footer as your template. Edit your message and you're good!
Test users are your friends. If you don't know about the thing where you can write your email as [email protected], it's the best.