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Hi all,

We’re trying to zap Nationbuilder RSVP’s to a Google Sheet using the ‘Person updated’ trigger in NB.

Basically, if a person RSVP’s to an event, they get a certain tag. We use the ‘Person updated’ trigger, then filter to only include people with the specified tag. If they have that tag, we use the ‘Look up in Google Sheet’ action combined with ‘If person doesn’t exist, add new row’.

This goes swimmingly in the beginning, but as more and more people RSVP to an event (sometimes 1000+), more and more people will pass through the filter, too. Which means the ‘Look up in Google Sheet’ will get triggered a lot, even though nothing happens after the look-up.

The result? We reach 5 tot 10k tasks for an event of 1.000 people. This doesn’t seem proportional to us for what seems like a fairly typical use case.

Maybe I’m overlooking something simple?

An alternative I’ve thought of is adding a second task after the Google sheet lookup, which basically adds a second tag to the person in Nationbuilder, which then can be used to filter out the person the next time. Problem with this: it adds a lot of clutter in our NB tags.

Hope all of this makes sense.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Hi @OSP 

Good question.

When you’re doing 1000s of Zap Runs, then yes the Zap Tasks can add up.

I think you’ll want to add another Zap action step for NationBuilder Create/Update Person to add a new Tag that indicates they are already on the GSheet, which then that Tag can be added as a Step 2 Filter condition to prevent future Zap Runs from wasting Zap Tasks.

 

Zap Steps

  1. Trigger: NationBuilder - Person Updated
  2. Action: Filter
    1. Make sure to add the Tag being set in Step 4 as a condition here to prevent future Zap Runs
  3. Action: GSheets - Lookup/Create Row
  4. Action: NationBuilder - Create/Update Person
    1. Add Tag

 

NOTE: You’ll also probably want to bulk update the Persons already in the GSheet with the Tag in NationBuilder to prevent wasting more Tasks.

Hi there @OSP - checking in with how you’re getting by with Troy’s advice, it does sound like a a filter may help prevent unwanted Zap Tasks from adding up. Let us know if you have any other questions or hit any other roadbumps!

Best- Rachael

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