Managing Automation Rules

Automation Rules

Powerful. Flexible. Customizable. On the HL platform, Automation Rules are a versatile tool that can be configured to trigger just about any desired action you want or need. In many ways, they work as "virtual community assistants" that allow you to automate tedious and time-consuming actions that likely need to be performed across your site on a daily, weekly, and/or monthly basis. Ultimately, they enable Community Managers to spend their time and energy focusing on their most important responsibility: Increasing member engagement.

Use this article for help if you find an automation rule not firing, or are having general trouble with an automation rule.

On the automation rules page, you can:

1. Create a new rule (see the Creating Automation Rules section below).
2. Edit an existing rule's configured criteria.
3. Click the drop-down to access a few management actions, including:

1. Scheduling/unscheduling a rule. A “Scheduled” rule means it will run at the schedule/frequency set on the Configure Automation Rule Settings page. Ensure a rule is Unscheduled if you don’t want it to run (this is useful when you’re creating Automation Rules to be used later).
2. Running a report for a rule to view its usage and which users were affected within the defined date range.
3. Creating a new rule using an existing rule's settings and criteria. Copying existing rules is an excellent way to create new rules (especially complex ones) with minimum effort.
4. Deleting a rule.

NOTE: Use the menus at the top to filter specific rule categories and groups within those categories, as well as filter scheduled/unscheduled rules.

Creating Automation Rules

Because Automation Rules are so complex, highly customizable, and organization-specific, it's impossible to outline how to create the rule(s) you specifically want or need. Instead, we'll showcase how to create a sample rule to help you learn the basic concepts you can then apply to create your own.

NOTE: Your HL site is provisioned with our best-practice rules already in place; these rules, marked with "BP" in the Group column, give Super Admins a starting point, needing only simple tweaks to fit the needs of your community.

SCENARIO - Creating an Email-based Rule: Numerous users without profile photos have been posting to one of your Discussion forums. You'd like to reach out to these users via email to prompt them to upload profile photos, which can be achieved with an email-based rule.

The creation of this rule requires three main steps:

STEP 1 - CREATE AN EMAIL TEMPLATE

You need to first create the email template you want to send to these users, which you can do on the Communities > Email Templates page, located in the Admin interface. From here, click Add a Template.

On the resulting page:

• Give the template a name that makes its purpose clear (this is not shown to recipients).
• Make sure the Category is set to Automation Rules.
• Enter the email address where you want replies sent. TIP: If you want replies sent to your community manager, insert the variable CommunityManager.EmailAddress to include the address listed on the Configure Automation Rule Settings page. This way, if the community manager ever changes, or their email address does, the variable will automatically update it to match the provided community manager's email.
• Write a compelling subject to grab your users' attention.
• Write an HTML and text-only version of your desired message.

NOTE: Where applicable, be sure to add mail merge variables in the HTML version of your message; these variables are automatically replaced with the appropriate information when the email is sent, and allow you to easily include information that's automatically personalized for each recipient (e.g., automatically inserting each user's first name, etc.). 

To view the list of available variables, click the Mail merge variable selectorbutton at the bottom-right of the HTML toolbar. We recommend at least inserting the FirstName variable so each email is personalized to each recipient. This variable is located under the Contact category.

• Click Finish to create your template.