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How to create multi channel communication system

  • 28 October 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 64 views

My community has daily email blasts that are funnelled through one person who moderates what will be sent to subscribers. There is unrest in the community because of the moderator’s policies and some subscribers are not happy receiving emails that are of no interest to them. And, some people don’t like getting their news and information through email. I’m completely new to zapier and what’s possible, so please bare with me if my question does not apply here. 

I’m trying to visualize a way to create a system that has a place where someone initiates a communication to the community and subscribers can receive that message in their preferred channel, whether it’s twitter, instagram, facebook messenger, whatsapp, email, etc. The intake form would have categories that are required to be chosen, such as Commercial, Animal Rescue, PSA’s, etc, Subscribers  choose the categories they are interested in and their preferred delivery method . Perhaps they could also choose the frequency, such as 3Xday, or whatever. Is there a way to do this?

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Best answer by Matthew Heath 28 October 2020, 18:41

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3 replies

Thank you for the information, sounds like too much work for a free service. It was just an idea and I appreciate the feedback.

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Hi @jasper

As @Matthew Heath mentioned, this would likely require a custom integration to be built. You can check out our Zapier-certified Experts in our brand new directory :) 

You could also post in the Work Offered category with an explanation of what you’re looking for. Are you using a specific Community application, and do they have an API that you could leverage, maybe?

It would probably be quite complicated to set this up through Zapier directly, partly because each system is so different (e.g. Twitter has a different word count limit to Facebook Messenger, you can’t DM someone through Twitter’s API, and so on).

My approach would be to do something like this:

  1. Set up a form to storage solution Zap (e.g. a form app to an SQL database or a Google Sheet or whatever)
  2. Perhaps set up a Google Sheets to Webhook Zap that lets your communicator enter data into the Google Sheet which is then sent via webhook to a custom app (that you/a developer would need to build) which then looks up the details of each subscriber and sends them the communication via their preferred channel.

Admittedly a lot of the heavy lifting would need to be done through the custom app itself, so you would need to engage some developer resources (perhaps from https://platform.zapier.com/partners/trusted-developers) which I appreciate isn’t ideal - sorry about that.

Let me know if you have any further questions about my approach here - happy to help further!