Automation Steps

Steps are the actions an automation performs, in order. Each step acts on one of three things: the enrolled contact, the record that triggered the automation, or a set of records you filter. This page lists every step type.

Messaging steps

• Send email — emails the enrolled contact at their primary email address. You supply the from name, from email, subject, and body. 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.
• 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 — a run fails rather than modify more than 500 records.

Flow steps

• Wait — pause the workflow for the minutes you set before the next step runs. Regular steps can also carry their own delay via Add delay after this step; both mechanisms are equivalent.

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.