The Chief Automation Officer
I signed up for Zapier on March 5, 2014. I was Chief Operating Officer at Stupid Cancer at the time. Back then, I couldn't tell you what a cloud computing stack was, but I had one, and Zapier unlocked many doors and flipped on many light switches for me, professionally.
Three months after joining Zapier, Slack hit the market, and I was off to the races with automation. Suddenly every business data point was funneling into Slack as it quickly became the brain of Stupid Cancer. I have blogged in the past about Slack, so I will avoid doing that here. As a result, Slack dinged all day long at Stupid Cancer, and it still does in my various current roles.
When Wade Foster, Zapier CEO, posted this on LinkedIn, I felt seen:
Without realizing it, I have spent most of the past decade becoming a well-tuned Chief Automation Officer. It’s subtly been the hallmark of my career.
One of my favorite byproducts of automation is just how amazed people are at the very nature of it. There is little budget or margin of error for trying things out in the nonprofit world, especially with fundraising tools. Most fundraising platforms are awful and siphon much-needed funds out of charities to line their pockets. They would argue that they make it possible for nonprofits to be successful, and that's a debate I would love to have. I digress. People are amazed when you connect multiple apps, and data moves around 24/7.
With Zapier, we could suddenly do more than our out-of-the-box fundraising platform could do alone. I was not left wanting seven features and having to settle for four. I could have it all.
I didn't need to export donors and import them into Mailchimp.
I didn't need to watch my email for Stripe donations; I could get a Slack notification.
I didn't need to create a to-do list task manually; Zapier took care of it.
My pivot to the private sector has created more meaningful automation opportunities in recent years. Now operating a membership-based company, my automation is focused on moving people through different states, such as lead, contact, active member, and former member. These states affect how we interact with you and your place in our cloud stack.
I wish I could say I spent a lot of time making flow charts and thinking about the end-to-end journey of my data. The reality, though, is most of my Zaps are born out of acute necessity and team inspiration. Perhaps one day, I’ll start keeping notes.
One consideration when running through the paces of creating automation is where Zapier fits alongside an app’s internal workflow system. Zoho Campaigns comes to mind in this example. I might use Zapier to get you from Facebook Leads to a Zoho Campaigns Mailing list with additional information. Still, I will let Zoho Campaigns read your contact record and qualify you for an email workflow. Keeping track of these relationships is essential so you don’t create loops or unforeseen automatic enrollment.
Automation can be daunting if you don’t know where to start. Services like Upwork have professionals for hire on a short-term basis to get you started. Once you start seeing what’s possible and connecting the dots between your workflows and cloud apps, you’ll get back those wasted hours doing things manually.
