Every job has repetitive tasks. And you are always on the lookout for ways to speed up your workflow. Automation in Aha! Ideas lets you create rules to automate important tasks so that you can focus on prioritizing feedback, interacting with your users, and capturing innovative ideas.
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Create an automation rule
To create an automation rule, navigate to Settings ⚙️ -> Workspace -> Automation. You will need to have workspace owner user permissions to create automation rules.
Click Add rule to create an automation rule. From there, select Add ideas rule to create a custom automation rule or choose an example rule to get you started.
Automation rules have three parts: triggers, conditions, and actions. Each rule starts with a trigger. If the trigger happens and all the conditions are met, then the actions you define will run automatically.
Let's start with triggers. Each rule has one trigger. There are three triggers to choose from:
<Record> is created
<Record or field> is created or updated
<Record> meets a time limit
Use the dropdowns to choose a trigger. The list of available fields will include both Standard and Custom fields (if you have any enabled for your workspace) but will not include collaborative fields like idea descriptions.
Once you have selected a trigger, you can add optional conditions to focus your automation rule — so it runs only when every condition has been met. Conditions apply to both Standard and Custom fields, and like triggers, will not include collaborative fields like idea descriptions. You can add up to 10 conditions. For example:
You might want to send an email to stakeholders if an idea receives more than 100 votes — but only if the idea is in a specific category.
You might want to assign an idea to a product manager on your team to review if an idea is in the Needs review status and in any one of multiple ideas categories.
You might want to create a to-do for an idea's assignee if the idea is Planned but it is missing an Opportunity amount custom field.
You might want to create a to-do for an idea's assignee if the idea's Category is a specific value.
Finally, choose an action. Each rule can have multiple actions, which all run simultaneously if the conditions are met and the rule triggers.
You can choose from the following actions:
Action |
Effect |
Update the field |
Update a field on the record that triggered the automation. You cannot update collaborative fields like feature descriptions. |
Add a to-do or approval |
Add a to-do or approval to-do to the record that triggered the automation. You can customize the to-do title and description and #mention other ideas. You can also assign the to-do to one or more users. Or dynamically assign users and set the due date for a certain time after the to-do is first created. |
Post an admin response |
Add an admin response to an idea. In addition to public and private comments, you can post an admin response to an idea, noting an official response to the idea's subscribers. Use admin responses to message whether a piece of feedback is something your team is unlikely to implement — or something just added to your official roadmap. |
Add a private comment |
Add a comment to the record that triggered the automation. You can customize the comment and #mention other ideas. |
Send an email |
Send an email to one or more Aha! Ideas users in your account. You can customize the email subject and body text, and #mention other ideas. Each email will include a link back to the record that triggered the automation. |
When you have created your action, you can create another or click Save rule to save your rule.
Your rule will be disabled by default. If you want to enable your rule, check the Enabled checkbox next to the Save rule button.
Back in the Settings ⚙️ -> Workspace -> Automations page, you can see a list of all the rules you have created, sorted alphabetically. The order of the rules does not matter — all rules run simultaneously, not sequentially.
Automation rules are workspace-specific. They can affect ideas in other workspaces, but they can only be triggered in the workspace where you created them. This is because each workspace in your account may use different workflows, statuses, layouts, or custom fields. You can copy an automation rule and move it to another workspace, but you should make sure that it fits that workspace's settings before you enable it.
Dynamically assign users
Dynamically assigning users is a helpful option for automation rules that should not assign the same predefined user every time. You can assign work to the teammate listed in any standard or custom user field — such as the record's Created by user.
In the Actions step of your automation rule setup, select an action that uses an Aha! Ideas user field — like changing an idea's assignee or creating a to-do. To dynamically assign users, select the same as from the Aha! Ideas user field action, then select the user field you would like to reference for your assignee. When the rule runs, it will look up the current user in the selected field and assign work to them.
A custom user field is a good way to capture which teammates will interact with an idea in different categories, or throughout its workflow.
If the user in the field you select changes before the automation rule triggers — for example, if an idea is assigned to a new product manager to review before it reaches the internal "PM review" status — the automation rule will use that new person when it runs. When the rule is run, it will check to make sure that the referenced field is not blank and that the assigned user has access to the workspace. If not, then the rule will not run and a message will be captured in the rule's log.
Time limit triggers
Create automation rules based on the amount of time a record spends in a specific status. This helps you move work along at the pace you desire by alerting you when a record has not progressed to the next status for a certain amount of time.
For example, let's say you want to review all new ideas within one week of their submission in your ideas portal. You can set an automation rule that will add a to-do for the idea assignee if it has been in a Needs review status for 6 days.
To use time-based automation, choose the Meets a time limit trigger when creating your new automation rule. Enter the number of days and select a status from the dropdown to create your trigger. Add a condition when necessary, create your action, and save your automation rule.
After saving your automation rule, records will trigger automation actions going forward for records that change to the selected status and meet the configured time limit.
Records that met your automation rule's configured time limit and status at the time the rule was created will not trigger automation actions.
Example automation rules
Need some inspiration? When you click Add rule, you can see a few example automation rules. Click any of them to get started or choose an example rule from this list.
You can always customize an example rule to fit your needs.
Name |
Trigger |
Condition(s) |
Actions |
|
Assign an idea to the reporting team when the category changes to Reporting. Create a new automation rule for each category that you want to assign to a specific person. |
Idea categories is changed to a specific value |
Update field assigned user |
|
Assign an email to a specific user when the ideas category is one of five different categories and the status is Needs review |
Idea categories is changed to add these five categories |
Status is Needs review |
Update field assigned user |
Send the product team an email reminder whenever an idea in a certain category becomes popular. |
Idea vote count over <number> |
Idea categories is changed to add this category |
Send email |
Make an idea visible on a portal after it has been reviewed. |
Idea status is changed to a specific value |
Update the field visibility |
|
Post an admin response on an idea |
Idea status is changed to a specific value |
Post an admin response |
|
Create a to-do when an idea has been in in the same status for a specific number of days |
Idea meets the time limit of <number> days since changing to <status> |
Create to-do to review the idea |
Copy automation rules to another workspace
Automation rules depend on your workspace settings to run correctly. Across the workspaces in your account, you may have configured different workflows, statuses, layouts, or custom fields. Users may have different permissions in different workspaces as well. Because of this, each automation rule runs in the workspace where it was created.
But this doesn't mean you need to manually recreate every automation rule in each workspace in your account. You can copy automation rules across workspaces in three steps.
First, navigate to Settings ⚙️ -> Workspace -> Automation and hover over the rule you want to copy. Click Copy.
Second, after editing the copied rule to your liking, navigate back to All automation rules, hover over your copied rule, and click Move. Use the Choose workspace dropdown to select the workspace or parent line where you want to move the rule.
Third, navigate to the workspace where you moved your rule and confirm that it will still run as expected. Any workspace-specific fields in your new rule will be blank with a red border around them. Fill in the relevant information, Save your rule, and you're done!
View automation logs
Your automation rule will run as soon as it is first Enabled; automation rules are disabled by default. There are several ways to see your automation rule at work across your workspace.
Under the rule's title at the top of the page, you can see whether it has been enabled, and a count of how many times your rule has run since it was created.
At the top right of the page in the Rule configuration window, you can see an audit log of actions taken by your rule. Click View log messages to access the log. Red messages indicate errors, Yellow messages indicate warnings, and Blue messages indicate information.
In affected records' history, actions taken by an automation rule will show up as coming from Aha! automation.
Automated actions taken by a fixed workflow will also show up as coming from Aha! automation.