Automation Steps

Steps are what an automation does. Action steps act on one of three things: the contact in the automation, the record that triggered it, or a set of records you filter. Routing steps decide which path a person takes next. This page lists every step type.

Messaging steps

• Send email — emails the contact at their primary email address. You set the from name, from email, an optional reply-to, and the subject, and design the email in the same builder used for broadcasts (Edit email). The from email is either an address at one of your verified sending domains (you choose the part before the @) or the shared CauseVox address newsletter@mg.causevox.com. An automation can't be turned on with any other from email, and if its domain is later deleted or shows as unverified when it's re-checked, each email it tries to send fails; picking another address and publishing fixes it for everyone, including people already partway through, from their next step. Skipped if the contact has no primary email.
• Send SMS — texts the enrolled contact at their primary phone number.
• Send email notification — emails your staff at fixed addresses you list (up to 10, comma separated). This step is independent of the enrolled contact — use it for internal alerts like "a major gift just came in." It always sends from the platform address.

Send email vs. Send email notification

Send email messages the contact moving through the automation. Send email notification messages your own team. They are separate steps on purpose — staff alerts are never suppressed by a contact's unsubscribe.

Contact steps

These act on the contact flowing through the automation:

• Tag contact / Untag contact — apply or remove a CRM tag.
• Add contact to audience / Remove contact from audience — manage the contact's membership in an audience you pick. Adding supports a subscribed or unsubscribed status; only subscribed members receive sends.
• Update a contact field — set a field on the contact, either to a fixed value or copied from a field on the triggering record.
• Add contact to a kanban board — create a card for the contact on a board and stage you pick. Later steps can include a link to the new card — for example, in a staff notification — from the merge tag picker's Earlier steps group (card_url).
• Create a task — create a task for a teammate, linked to the contact.

Trigger-record steps

These act on the record that fired the trigger — the donation, ticket order, registration, and so on:

• Tag the trigger record — apply a tag to that record.
• Update a trigger-record field — set a field on that record, fixed or copied from another of its fields.

Set-based steps

These act on many records at once, selected by a filter you build:

• Tag all matching records — tag every record matching the filter. The scope selector controls the reach: all matching records in the org, only the trigger record's campaign, or only the trigger record's contact.
• Add all matching contacts to audience — add every contact matching the filter to an audience.

Set-based steps have a safety cap — the step fails rather than modify more than 500 records.

Timing and routing steps

• Wait — pause for the time you set before the next step runs. On the form, + Add delay after this step inserts one.
• Branch — send people down different paths. It decides on the trigger record, the contact, or an earlier step's result (for example, the status a webhook answered with). The first path whose conditions match wins; anyone else goes down Otherwise. If a step whose result the branch reads failed, the branch doesn't pick a path: the person's entry ends as Failed, and its steps show which step failed. A condition on a skipped step's result never matches, so that person goes down the next path whose conditions do match, or Otherwise.
• Random split — divide people across paths by percentage, for example to test two versions of an email. A person always gets the same path.
• Wait until — hold people until something happens (a donation, a form, a tag, and so on) or a time limit passes, then continue down It happened or Timed out.

Branch, Random split, and Wait until are added on the diagram. The path each person took shows in their entry's steps.

Integration steps

• POST to webhook URL — send the trigger record's data as JSON to a URL you control, with an optional signing secret so your endpoint can verify the payload came from us.