Getting Started With Automation (via Zapier)

Foreign. Hi, this is Anna Burgess Yang and if you've never created an automation through Zapier before, here's what you need to do to get started. You're going to come over here to create and you're going to create a zap on this screen you're going to select a trigger event. That's what gets your zap started. So you're going to select trigger and then search from the thousands of apps available. And I'm going to choose just select Calendly. So I'm going to create an automation based on someone booking a meeting with me through Calendly. Next, you'll select a trigger event and this will depend on the app you choose. Each app has its own trigger events and you have to select something from what's available. So in this case I'm going to select that an invitee was created the that someone scheduled an event with me. Next I have the option to select event type. This is not required. You can see up above this has the little red asterisk that means this field is required, but event type is not. So I could set up this zap based on any event or I could set it up based on a specific type of event and then it will show my events set up in calendly. So I'm going to select my 30 minute meeting, then I'm going to select Continue and run a test. When I run a test, zapier will look for a couple of recent invitees created through Calendly. In this case I only have one, but it might show up to three. So then I can look at this and it will show the data that calendly is sending, including the email address of the person, the person's name, any answers to custom fields you have set up, as well as a bunch of other data like when the meeting was created and some things you may or may not use. So I'm going to continue with this as my test. Next I'm going to select my connection app. So I'm going to connect this to todoist, which is what I use for to do items and then I'm going to select what do I want to have happen in todoist in this case. There are lots of options in todoist such as creating a project. In this case I'm going to create a task and then I'm going to select my todoist account. Now I'm going to see a lot of fields that are specific to todoist. So todoist has projects, so I'm going to select what project I want to add this task to. This is related to my freelance work so I'm going to select that. Then I'm going to type in the title of the task. Maybe I want to connect with a calendly invitee on LinkedIn so I'm going to type in a reminder for myself connect on LinkedIn and then I want to put the invitee's name from calendly. So what I do is click on this plus and select the invitee name that calendly is sending in zapier. That way when this zap runs it will use whatever invitee name is collected through calendly. So that is what we call a dynamic part of the field. It will change this first part connect on LinkedIn. That's static so that is not going to change. It will be the same every time this app runs. Todoist also has a note field so I could pull in information from calendly if I wanted, for example the type of meeting or maybe this answer to a custom field that I have set up if I want to see that. Next I'm going to type in a due date. Todoist recognizes human formatted due dates so I'm going to type in tomorrow and I could also add a priority and label in todoist if I wanted. All of these fields are going to be specific to whatever app you choose and then I can test this step. Then I would go intodoist and make sure that everything is working the way I had expected. I'll come up here and rename this zap so I might call it calendly to todoist so I remember which apps are involved and then I'll come down here and click Publish. Once I turn on the zap it will automatically run in the background every time an invitee is created in calendly. If you'd like to see examples of other tutorials that I've created, you can go to tinkeringwithideas IO and you can see step by step instructions for setting up different automations. Thanks for watching.