How to Set Up The Zapier x inSided Integrations (+ FAQ)

Our Zapier integration enables you to connect inSided with thousands of other apps like Slack and Jira to build workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and save time.

How to set up the inSided x Zapier integration

If you’re just getting started with Zapier

• Our Zapier app page can be found here: https://zapier.com/apps/insided/integrations.
• Start setting up a Zap and then follow the steps below!

If you’ve come here directly from the step to authenticate your inSided account in Zapier...

When you create an inSided Zap, you'll be asked to enter your inSided API key.

To locate your API Key in your inSided account, please follow these steps:

1. Log into your inSided Control environment
2. Go to Integrations > Apps via the menu.
3. Click "Zapier" on the Apps page.
4. Click "Generate API Key"
5. Copy the generated API key to your clipboard 

   

    

Paste your key back into your Zapier account and then “Continue.”

If all steps were successful, your inSided account will now be successfully connected.

What can you achieve with the inSided x Zapier integration?

Zapier is a great way to boost internal adoption of the community by bringing community activity into the tools and workflows of colleagues at other departments, like Product, Support, Marketing, and Customer Success.

Whilst it’s common as a community manager to spend your day working in the inSided platform, your colleagues are spread across other tools. Integrating those tools with inSided via Zapier reduces the barrier to entry for colleagues to get value out of the community.

Here are three common use cases that our Zapier app is able to power:

• Self-service: improve internal collaboration when answering questions / responding to users in the community by enabling your colleagues to read and respond to community posts without leaving Slack.

• Product feedback: automate the community ideation workflow for your product team by surfacing the right ideas at the right time, whether that’s into Jira, Slack, Productboard, or any other tool!

• Engagement: help customer success managers keep tabs on their customers by sending Slack messages when one of their customers registers on the community or posts a new question or idea. Enable customer marketing to create automated community email audiences by adding users to mailing lists in tools like Mailchimp when a user registers or posts a topic in a particular category.

What triggers/actions/searches are available in Zapier?

Triggers

• New Attendee (when a new attendee signs up for an event in the community)

• New Reply (when a new reply is added to a question, conversation, idea, or article)

• New Topic (when a new conversation, question, idea, or article is created)

• New Topic Like (when a new like is added to a question, conversation, idea, or article)

• New User (when a new user registers on the community)

• Reported Post (when a post is reported)

• Updated Idea Status (when the status of an idea is changed by a moderator)

• Updated Moderator Tags (when the moderator tags of a topic are changed by a moderator)

   

Actions

• Append Moderator Tags to Topic (append Moderator Tags to Topic [question, conversation, idea, or article])

• Create Reply (add a reply to a topic [question, conversation, idea, or article])

• Assign Points (assign points to a user)

• Add Custom Role to User (add custom role to user)

• Add Custom Role to User (add a custom role to user)

• Assign Badge ( assign a budge to a user)

• API action ( allow to use custom API call)

  Please see our API documentation

Searches

• Find User (look up a user in the community to get more details about them) 

• Get Assigned Points of User ( get the assigned points of a user)

• Find Topic (by moderator tag) (lookup a topic in the community by whether it contains a certain moderator tag)

FAQ

What data is available when looking up a user with the ‘Find User’ search/action?

You can access the following data in the trigger payload:

• Username, email, and user ID
• Roles (primary + custom)
• Userid
• Rank
• Join date
• Custom profile fields
• Basic statistics about the user (total replies (posts), topics, answers). The likes count comes from a legacy data source and is deprecated.

Please note that some data points may be transformed and simplified when running a live Zap. This means that you may see additional data points when testing a Zap. For example, when testing a New Topic trigger, you may see the following data points - ID/Username/Avatar/Rank/mainRole:

But when you deploy the Zap, you may notice that the Rank and mainRole data points are no longer displaying: 

This is because the live Zap runs the event payload through a connector that transforms and simplifies the data points. The data is still accurate and the full information can be found on inSided and within your other integrated systems.

Why do you only support finding a topic by moderator tag?

• We currently only support finding a topic by moderator tag at the moment because it helps power some of the key use cases shown above (two-way links between Slack and inSided, JIRA and inSided, etc.). If you have a use case that requires finding a topic via a different attribute, please let us know in the replies!

Do I have to choose a content type/category when setting up the triggers for new topics/replies/likes?

• No - these are optional steps that you can use to filter the topics that trigger your Zaps.
• If you want to trigger Zaps from all content types or content from all categories, simply leave these fields blank when setting up the trigger.

I can’t see certain categories in the filter - why is that?

We only display public categories in the filter drop-downs on content-based triggers. This is because of a limitation where we’re only able to retrieve a list of publicly visible categories. However, content in private categories does still trigger these Zaps - it’s just that the categories don’t appear in the list for filtering.

Can I use Zapier on my staging environment?

• No - unfortunately Zapier will only work on a production community and not on any staging environments. Attempts to authorise Zapier on staging will yield an authentication error with the API token.

There are limitless possibilities in Zapier. If you need inspiration or some help getting started, check out the Zap templates on our Zapier page.

What can I do with API actions?

• You are no longer limited by the amounts of inbuilt Zapier events, this means many new functionalities are potentially available. For example:

  • Auto setting of public tags - previously this was only possible to do via moderator tags. e.g content written by users with a certain custom role or from a certain organization can be automatically tagged now.

  • Creation of all content types is now possible - previously only replies to topics could be achieved with Zapier, now you can leverage the API to post entire topics of any content type. e.g content can be kept in sync between different sites, content added to one place can be pushed to the community along with any edits to topics.

  • Deletion of topics and users is now possible via Zapier, e.g responding to GDPR data removal requests or perhaps just keeping content in sync between two different sources (data removed from one platform can trigger the same data to be removed from the community).

  • Showing poll results, you can now get poll results for certain topics and then render this data on another platform.

  • Leaderboard data is now available in Zapier - meaning you can run reports on which users are obtaining the most points over which period. This data can then be used to award prizes automatically e.g badges or perhaps physical prizes.

  • Events now have a lot more possibilities - you can now register users as attendees for specific events automatically, e.g users signing up to either the community or another platform can be automatically opted in for event attendance.

  • User management is much easier now that all of the user API endpoints are available, keeping user bases in synchronization just became a lot easier. Users removed from one platform can now trigger an easy API call to remove the same user's profile from the community. Updates to user information can now also be easily pushed to (or from) the community so that user profiles can stay in synchronization throughout your entire software ecosystem.

• A huge amount of possibilities have been opened up now that the search API endpoints have been exposed in Zapier. Users can perform federated search of community content much easier now with a Zapier API integration. For example:

  • Queries can be passed to Zapier and results returned back to the origin source for rendering on page.

  • Allows for a single search repository without having to index the community content.

  • Gives you the exact same search results that the community search returns for a more seamless CX.

• Entire gamification strategies can now be achieved solely in Zapier, some examples include:

  • Awarding points to users who post on another website e.g Reddit and who also have a community account.

  • Getting users who have been awarded a certain amount of points and then triggering another action e.g free conference tickets.

  • Awarding more points to users who have posted in specific categories.

  • Automatically awarding badges to users who have attended a certain event.