Productivity applications are becoming increasingly common in the workplace as they help individuals and teams remain organized and also provide leadership with high level insight into the progress of various workflows. Given how many of our users are using ChangeTower to help automate their internal workflows in parallel with other productivity applications, we thought we would provide an example of how one can leverage the platform's Zapier integration to connect with Trello, one of the most popular productivity applications among working professionals.
Step-by-Step Guide: Integrating ChangeTower with Productivity Apps
This is a step-by-step guide on how to connect your ChangeTower account to Trello via the Company's Zapier integration. If this is your first time setting up the ChangeTower app on Zapier, you should review our quick intro/overview on getting started on Zapier before attempting this integration as this guide assumes that you're already familiar with how to set up an integration via Zapier's app marketplace. If you're well familiar with ChangeTower's Zapier integration and are specifically interested in seeing an example with Trello, you can skip to Step 6.
Step 1: Start a new Zap and select ChangeTower as your 'Trigger App'
Step 2: As seen in the following image, there is one action to select, “New Notification”
Step 3: Connect your ChangeTower account and test it. Upon being completed, the testing button should turn green and say “Success!”.
Note: If you have not already done so, you will be prompted to provide your API token in a new window. You can find your unique token in the 'My Account' section of your ChangeTower account.
Step 4: Select one of the 3 Notification options displayed (it will automatically display up to the three most recent notifications in your account).
Note: It does not matter which one you select as you will set up the rules (e.g. which types of alerts trigger which actions) in subsequent steps.
Step 5: After selecting the right notification to follow, you will be prompted with a preview of it. This concludes connecting your ChangeTower account, and you should move on to the next step.
Step 6 (optional): next you can opt to step up custom conditions or rules for Zapier to check for before proceeding with the subsequent action (which we haven't done yet but will in just a moment). An example of a custom rule or condition could be, if the ChangeTower notification came from a Monitor whose name contains "CNN", then proceed with the following actions. If not, stop here.
Step 7 (optional): Here is where you define the rule or condition we just described. In the below example, we set a condition that will check each ChangeTower notification to see if the "Monitor Name" field contains the keyword "Trello". Filters are a premium feature on Zapier but as you can likely imagine, they can become quite powerful in enabling you to send up very specific conditions / criteria to automate a whole suite of workflows.
Step 9: If everything is entered correctly, you should be prompted with a message (as seen in the picture below). Click on the “Continue” button and proceed to the next step where you will define the action you would like to trigger if / when your condition(s) have been met.
Note: you have to have at least one notification in your ChangeTower account that meets your custom criteria for you to get a successful message. If you started to create your Zap before making the Monitor with the specific criteria, it will not display a successful message at this step.
Step 10: Next, this is where you can select which application for Zapier to trigger a TBD action. We're going to choose Trello here but you could choose any application from Zapiers library.
Once you've selected the application (i.e. Trello), you will then choose a custom action you would like Zapier to trigger. Note that Zapier has a whole suite of app-specific actions to which can be triggered. For example, you choose Trello-specific actions such as creating a list to an existing board in your Trello account, creating a new board, and/or adding a card to a specific board and list (which you will specify). In this demo, we choose the “Create Card” action.
Step 11: Connect your Trello account. If you've yet to connect your Trello account to Zapier (e.g. this is your firs time), you can click on the “Connect an Account” button and go through their setup wizard.
Step 12: Define the desired action. In this case, we are creating a Card whenever a ChangeTower Monitor with the keyword "Trello" fires a notification so we need to tell Zapier to which Board and List the newly created card should be added. Note that the options in these dropdowns will automatically display the options in your connected Trello account.
We recommend that you include the name of your ChangeTower Monitor (and the date of the notification) when naming your Card.
Step 13 (optional): You're nearly done! This last step allows you to define what details are included in your Card. For instance, you have the option of including the webpage's screenshot when ChangeTower issues the change alert. There are of course other options as well, including custom labels, text, and more.
We find “File Attachments” and “URL attachments” to be especially handy when it comes to monitoring pages for changes. In this example, we select the “Link to Full-page Image Snapshot” from the “File attachments” dropdown list.
Step 14: Test it out! If everything was properly set up (and the conditions were met), a new Card with your specific details will magically appear in the Board / List you've specified!
Step 15: Go to your Trello page, and confirm that the new card includes all the necessary information you wanted. You can always come back to Zapier and tweak your settings in order to get desired results.
This concludes the step-by-step guide to integrating ChangeTower, Zapier, and Trello. You can also integrate other apps with ChangeTower as well. Be sure to check out our other step-by-step guides for instructions on how to do so.