Automations

Automations let you say "when this happens, do that". You build them on a canvas: a trigger at the top, then steps hanging off it in the order you want them to run. Publish it, and TribeNest runs the whole thing for you every time the trigger fires.

This is how you wake up to a welcome series that sent itself, buyers who tagged themselves after their order, and abandoned baskets that chased themselves back.

Where to find automations

Open Operations then Automations in the sidebar.

Each automation is a row showing its name, what triggers it, and its status (draft, active or paused). Click a row to open the builder. The trash icon deletes an automation and its steps for good.

Creating an automation

1. Click New automation.
2. Optionally pick a Quick start to scaffold a ready-made flow, or leave it on Build from scratch.
3. If you are building from scratch, set the Trigger in two dropdowns: choose what it is about, then when it fires.
4. Give it a Name. One is suggested from your trigger, and you can change it.
5. Click Create & build.

New automations start as a draft, so nothing runs until you publish.

Quick starts

A quick start drops in the trigger and a working set of steps you can then edit. The ones available today:

• Low stock - tell you when a product's stock falls below a threshold you set.
• Event reminder - email ticket holders a set number of hours before the event starts.
• Donation thank-you - send a thank-you and receipt when a donation comes in.
• Abandoned cart recovery - a three-email win-back sequence. See Abandoned checkouts.
• Big order - fire when an order total goes above an amount.

Triggers

The trigger is what starts a run. The what dropdown is grouped so you can find things.

Forms

Every form you have built appears by its own name, and fires on Form submitted. The answers to that form become data your steps can use. If you want an automation that runs when someone fills in your booking enquiry form, pick that form here.

Collections

Each of your collections appears by name, firing on Entry created or Entry updated.

Sales and activity

The built-in things that happen in your tribe:

• Order - Order placed, Order paid, Order updated
• Contact - Contact created
• Membership - Membership started
• Product stock - Stock changed
• Donation - Donation received
• Event ticket - Ticket purchased
• Email subscriber - New subscriber joined
• Business Email - Email received
• Proposal / Contract - Contract signed, Proposal accepted, Document declined, Document sent
• Session booking - Session booked, Session rescheduled, Session cancelled
• Abandoned checkout - Checkout abandoned, Checkout recovered
• Project - Project created, Project status changed, Project completed, Project over budget
• Task - Task created, Task assigned, Task moved, Task completed
• Milestone - Milestone completed
• Time entry - Time logged

You can also narrow a trigger so it only fires in the cases you care about. See Only run when below.

The builder

Opening an automation drops you on the canvas.

Along the header, on the left: the automation's name, a badge saying whether it is Live, Paused or Draft, a badge naming its trigger, and a live check that reads compiles when everything is wired up or shows how many issues are left.

On the right, every action:

• Add step - opens the step picker.
• Runs - the history of every time this automation has fired.
• Test - try it against a real record.
• Save - keep your work without going live.
• Publish (or Unpublish once it is live).

The canvas below is the flow itself, full width under the header. The Trigger sits at the top and cannot be removed. Drag from the dot at the bottom of one step to the top of another to connect them, and that connection is the order things happen in. Click a step to open its settings in a panel on the right. Hover a step and a small X removes it.

If anything is unfinished, a Fix these to publish box appears in the corner listing the problems. Click one and it jumps you straight to the step that needs attention.

Adding a step

Click Add step and a search dialog opens over the canvas. Type what you want ("email", "wait", "branch") and it filters as you go, matching on the step name and its description. Steps are grouped into Actions (things that do something) and Controls (things that shape the flow).

The steps

Actions

Send email - the workhorse. See Send email below.

Send SMS - text a phone number. TribeNest only sends to people who have consented to texts.

Send WhatsApp - send an approved WhatsApp template message, again only to people who have consented.

Tag contact - add a tag to a contact. Type the tag in the step's settings.

AI Processor - hand some data and an instruction to AI and get a structured answer back that later steps can use. See The AI step below.

Create record and Update record - make or change a collection entry or a contact from data flowing through the automation. Pick what to create or update, and its fields appear below for you to fill in or point at earlier data. Leave a field unset to skip it.

Get referenced record - follow a link on the triggering record to load the whole thing. For example, an event ticket knows which event it belongs to, and this step loads that event so later steps can use its start date and title.

Call webhook - for wiring an automation into another tool you already use. Paste the web address that tool gave you into Webhook URL and TribeNest sends the current details there when the run reaches this step.

Controls

If / else - a branching check. See Conditions below. It has two clearly labelled outputs: a green Yes branch and a red No branch. Connect each to whatever should happen on that path.

Wait a while - pause the run for a fixed number of days, then carry on.

Wait until a date - pause until a date drawn from the record. See Waiting until a date.

Wait for an action - pause until the contact Opens the email or Clicks a link in the email, or until you Give up after a number of days. Point its Email to watch at an earlier Send email step. It has Matched and Timed out outputs, so the following steps can react to each.

Waiting until a date

This step is how you say "the day before the event" or "a week after they booked".

1. Add the step and open its settings.
2. Under When to resume, choose At the date exactly, Before the date or After the date.
3. If you chose before or after, set how long: a number plus weeks, days, hours or minutes.
4. Bind the date itself in the field below, pointing it at a date on the record, such as an event's start time.

A sentence under the controls spells out exactly what will happen, so you never have to guess which way round the offset goes.

You can also give it a fixed date instead of one drawn from the record. Choose Type a fixed value on the date field and you get a date-and-time picker with a timezone beside it. Pick the moment in whichever timezone you mean it in, and the line underneath confirms the exact moment it will wait until. That way "7pm" means one specific moment rather than whatever 7pm happens to mean somewhere else.

Send email

Open a Send email step and you get:

Send from

Choose which of your verified addresses this email goes out from. Leave it on the default and it uses your default sending identity, which is named in the dropdown so you can see exactly what recipients will see. If the address you picked has a reply-to set, the panel tells you where replies will land.

To have more than one address to choose from, add and verify them under Emails then Settings.

Email template

Pick a template you have built, or leave it on Don't use a template: write inline and write the email right here. With a template, the template provides the body and you still write the subject.

The rest

• Send to - usually the person the automation is about. TribeNest fills this in for you when it can. You can also point it at any other data, or type a fixed address.
• Subject - always required, even when using a template.
• Body - the rich editor, when you are writing inline.
• Reply-to and Recipient name - both optional.

Personalizing with merge variables

Drop the contact's own details into the subject and body so every email reads like it was written for that person:

• {{firstName}} - their first name
• {{name}} - their full name
• {{email}} - their email address

Under Personalization variables you can add your own. Give the tag a name, then point it at a value from an earlier step (a donation amount, an event title) or a fixed value. Type the tag anywhere in the subject or body and TribeNest swaps in the value at send time.

The AI step

AI Processor sends whatever you give it, plus an instruction, to AI and gets back a structured answer the rest of the automation can use. Classify an enquiry, summarise a long form answer, draft a subject line, score a lead.

1. Pick an AI model: Fast & economical (recommended), Balanced, or Most capable.
2. Write the Instruction to the AI, for example "Classify this support message and write a one-sentence summary".
3. Under Inputs from earlier steps, name each piece of data you want the AI to see. Click Add input, name it something like answers, then bind it to real data further down the panel.
4. Under What the AI should return, define each field you want back. Give it a name, pick its type (Text, Formatted text, Number, Yes / No, Date, Choice or List), and optionally describe it so the AI knows what you mean. A Choice field takes a comma-separated list of the allowed answers. A List field asks what the list is a list of.

Everything you define here becomes available to later steps. An AI-written subject line can go straight into a Send email step, and an AI verdict of "urgent" can drive an If / else branch.

Conditions

Both the If / else step and the trigger filter use the same editor.

1. Pick the field to check. The list offers everything available from earlier steps, labelled by which step it came from.
2. Pick a comparison: equals, is not, contains, greater than, is empty, and so on.
3. Set the value. When the field is a fixed set of choices, you pick from a dropdown. When it points at another record (an event, a donation, a contact), you get a searchable picker so you choose by name instead of pasting an identifier.

Add as many checks as you like and choose whether all must match or any can match.

Only run when

On the Trigger step, the same editor appears under Only run when.... Use it to narrow the trigger so the automation only starts in the cases you want: only orders over a certain amount, only contracts rather than proposals, only bookings for one particular session type. If a trigger fires but the filter does not match, no run is created at all.

Testing before you publish

Click Test and the Run this automation dialog opens.

1. Search for the record to run against by name, email or even an answer inside it, and pick one from the recent list. If your trigger type has nothing to list, you can paste an id instead.
2. Decide whether this is a preview or the real thing.
3. Click Run test.

By default a test run is a preview: it walks the whole automation and tells you how many steps ran, but nothing leaves the building. No emails, no messages, no webhooks, and no sitting through the delays.

Tick Live run (perform the real actions) and it becomes real. The warning that appears says exactly what that means: emails, messages and webhooks will actually fire, and the run is recorded in the history. The button turns red and reads Run live.

Runs

Click Runs to see every time this automation has fired, most recent first, with the Status, the Subject it ran against, when it Started and how long it took. A failed run shows its error right in the row.

Click View on any run for the full story:

• The Trigger data the run started with, using readable field names.
• Every step it executed, numbered in order, each with its status, how long it took, and its In and Out values, so you can see exactly what went in and what came back.
• An If / else step tells you which path it took.
• Any error, on the step that produced it.

This is the first place to look when an automation did something you did not expect.

Publishing, pausing and deleting

• Publish takes it live. It only succeeds once the automation compiles, meaning every required setting is filled in. Fix the listed issues first.
• Unpublish takes a live automation back to draft. It stops firing but keeps everything you built.
• Drafts and paused automations sit silent. A live one runs on its own every time a matching trigger happens.

Tips and patterns

• Welcome new subscribers. Trigger on Email subscriber then New subscriber joined, send a welcome email that greets them by {{firstName}}, wait a while, then send a follow-up.
• Remind ticket holders. Trigger on Event ticket then Ticket purchased, use Get referenced record to load the event, then Wait until a date set to 24 hours before its start, then email.
• Tag your buyers. Trigger on Order paid, add an If / else check on the total, then Tag contact on the Yes branch.
• Nudge the quiet ones. After a Send email step, add Wait for an action. Send a reminder on the Timed out branch, and skip it on Matched.
• Triage your inbox. Trigger on Business Email then Email received, run it through the AI Processor to classify it, and branch on the answer.
• Follow up on a signed contract. Trigger on Proposal / Contract then Contract signed, and email the client their next steps automatically.
• Act on a form. Pick the form itself as the trigger, then branch on the answers people gave.

Related

• Emails - the templates and sending addresses the Send email step uses
• Abandoned checkouts - cart recovery is built here
• Forms - every form is a trigger
• Documents - contracts and proposals are triggers too
• Segments - saved audiences you can act on
• Mira - can propose entire automations for you to approve