Automation Rules are a versatile tool that can be configured to trigger just about any action you 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.
IMPORTANT: The Community Name and Community Manager's Email Address must be specified on the Automation Rules Settings page before working with Automation Rules. If either of these values is missing, you'll get an error prompt on the Automation Rules page.
To manage your Automation Rules:
- In the Admin Toolbar, click Admin.
- Navigate to Automation > Automation Rules.
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Tasks that can be automated
- Sending targeted emails to various groups of users across your site, based on a set of criteria you choose
- Giving Ribbons to users
- Adding users to Higher Logic-managed communities
- Adding Higher Logic-managed Demographics to user profiles
- Adding users to Higher Logic-managed Security Groups
Create Automation Rules
Because Automation Rules are so complex, highly customizable, and organization-specific, it's impossible to outline how to create a specific rule you might want. Instead, we'll showcase how to create a few of the more common rules to help you learn the basic concepts that you can then apply to create the rules you want. Check out the articles below to learn more.
TIP: Your site is provisioned with our best-practice rules. These rules are marked with "BP" in the Group column and are intended to give Super Admins a starting point, from which they need to only make a few simple tweaks to fit the rules to their community.
- Create Automation Rule - Send an Email to Your Users
- Create Automation Rule - Add Users to an HL-managed Community
- Create Automation Rule - Add Users to a Security Group
- Create Automation Rule - Give Ribbons & Badges to Users
- Create Automation Rule - Give Demographics to Users
Manage Automation Rules
On the Automation Rules page, all of the default Automation Rules are listed, along with any custom ones you and other Super Admins may have created. From here, you can:
- Create a new rule (refer to the Create Automation Rules section above).
- Edit an existing rule's details and criteria.
- Click a rule's drop-down to access a few management actions, including:
- Scheduling/unscheduling the rule. A “Scheduled” rule means it will run at the schedule/frequency set on the 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).
- Running a report to view the rule's usage and which users were affected within the defined date range.
- Copying the rule to create one using its existing rule's settings and criteria. Copying existing rules is an excellent way to create new rules (especially complex ones) with minimum effort.
- Deleting a rule.
- Use the menus at the top to filter specific rule categories and groups within those categories, as well as filter scheduled/unscheduled rules.
Integration write-backs
If your site is integrated with a third-party database, some Automation Rules activities in your Community can be written to that database during the standard activity-sync process.
- Navigate to Settings > External Content > Activity Sync in the Admin interface in order to manage writeback activities on the Subscriptions tab.
To learn about the activity-sync process, see Member Activity Sync.