How Do I Test and Run my Workflow?

Once you've built an automated workflow, we're sure you'll be eager to get it up and running. Though you may want to test it out before you turn it loose.

When viewing your workflow, click on the "Actions" button in the upper right.

There, you will see two options, "Run enrollment" and "Run workflow."

When you run enrollment, you will notice that all of the edit icons on the workflow screen disappear. That's OK! The system does not allow any changes because it is running all of the queries associated with your workflow, so that Contacts can be enrolled in each step, just as they would when your workflow is active.

Once this process is complete, you will see that each step shows a counter for how many Contacts or Individuals qualify for each workflow step.

Click on the "Contacts" or "Individuals" text to view a list of all records enrolled in your step. You can even use the search box to find records in each step. This is a great way to confirm that your workflow is working as designed.

In cases where your workflow is not quite running as designed, you may need to do some troubleshooting, which requires an understanding of how records are assigned to each workflow step.

Workflows with multiple steps are designed to flow from left to right on the screen. For example, looking at the Donor Lifecycle workflow, we see four steps:

Laid out from left to right, these steps are:

This corresponds with what one might hope would be a donor's journey, starting as a non-donor and eventually becoming a major donor.

In order for a Contact to move through these steps from left to right, it's necessary to run the queries for each step in reverse order, from right to left. This way, Contacts can move forward in our workflow.

For example, let's say that a Sustaining Donor makes a major gift. That donor doesn't stop matching to the Sustaining Donor query, so if our queries ran from left to right, that donor would never move forward to the Major Donor step.

Instead, we start on the right, with the Major Donor query. Our hypothetical donor will match to that query, so they will move from the Sustaining Donor step to the Major Donor step.

Records can only be enrolled in one step within a single workflow, which also enables this progression. However, records can be enrolled in more than one workflow, so take care when building queries for different workflows, to avoid having your supporters receive too much communication all at once. Since they can be added and removed as workflow actions, Tags, can be an excellent way to manage exclusions.

Once you are confident that your workflow and enrollment are behaving as designed, it's time to put Virtuous to work! Select the "Run workflow" option from the Actions drop-down and you'll see two choices:

Select "Daily" to begin having your workflow run at the same time each day — typically in the very early morning. If you'd rather get going right away, select the "Now and Daily" option to have your workflow run immediately, regardless of the time of day. Your workflow will then continue to run on subsequent days at the usual early morning time. If at any point in the future your workflow fails to run three consecutive times, an email notification will be sent to the Virtuous user who created the workflow. 

Once your workflow is up and running, your team will have more time to spend connecting directly with your donors and prospects!