Background

The Apollos app can be closely integrated with the Rock platform, but it is a very different app than most church apps. In order to ease the transition for our congregation, we developed a workflow to welcome new users to the Apollos app. The user receives the SMS shortly after updating to the new app on their phone, provided that they have a valid mobile phone number loaded on their Rock profile and that they have SMS enabled.

How It Works

Apollos creates a new record in the PersonalDevice table each time the app is downloaded. The workflow simply triggers on Post Save for that table and sends an SMS to the Rock user. The workflow only sends the welcome message to new users (first time app downloads).

Step By Step

1. Create Global Variable

This workflow expects a global variable called ApollosAppPersonalDevice to be defined. This global variable is set to the value of the PersonalDeviceTypeValueId column for each new PersonalDevice record created by Apollos.

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As you can see, we set this to 1265, because that is the value we are seeing in the PersonalDevice table for each new Apollos app record. For your environment, you can either confirm directly with Apollos or examine the contents of the PersonalDevice table.

2. Upload Workflow

This is the easy step - simply upload the workload attached at the end of this recipe to your Rock instance.

3. Customize Workflow

Edit the workflow and navigate down to the Send SMS Message activity. You'll need to modify the first two actions:

  • Set SMS Message - customize the SMS text message as desired for your church. We planned to launch our app publicly on 8/20/2023, so you'll notice that we've customized the message slightly depending on whether the user download is pre-launch or post-launch. Feel free to either do something similar or remove the date check entirely.
  • Send SMS Message - you'll need to set the From field to your originating SMS number.

4. Set Workflow Trigger

Lastly, you'll need to set up a workflow trigger on each new PersonalDevice record:

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