Some people who attended my Puzzling Rock Blocks session at RX2018 asked for more details about how to setup a first time guest workflow. I will step through this from the standpoint of Josiah Rocke's suggested scenario. He wanted to use the New Family block (aka Add Group) and have his staff designate if it was the person's first time. That choice would then get examined in the workflow and, if it was set to "Yes",  he wanted the following to happen:

1. Save the date of the previous Sunday to the person's First Visit attribute.
2. Send the person a welcome email if their email address was known.
3. Create a connection request in a connection opportunity they had called "First Time Follow-up"

The beautiful thing is -- his staff only needs to select one thing (whether they are a first time guest) to make all that happen.  Here's an example of what they might see during the third step (setting attributes configured via the block settings) when adding a new family:

To do this, we added a new Person Attribute (under General Settings) of type Boolean (yes/no) and called it "Is First Time?" like this:

You might have noticed we also created a new Attribute Category (under General Settings) earlier called New Family.

We did this so it could be included on the New Family block through one of its many block settings:

That's all you do to make that first part happen. Now we need a workflow.

Once we create our new First Time Guest workflow we will come back here and set that in the New Family block setting for Adult Workflow(s) as shown here:

Workflow

Now let's create a new workflow called First Time Guest.

The workflow will have three attributes and two activities, each with three actions. Here are the workflows attributes:

1. Person (field type Person) – This is used to capture the data passed from the New Family block.
2. Is First Time Guest (field type Boolean) – This is used to capture the Yes/No value from the person's "Is First Time?" attribute which you added to the 'New Family' block.
3. FTG Connection Opportunity (field type Connection Opportunity) – This is used to define which connection opportunity to use when opening a follow-up connection request for the person.

The first two attributes are straight forward, but the FTG Connection Request opportunity is a little more interesting so it's shown here. It's the place where new connection requests will be created for each new first time guest:

The workflow has two Activities: Start and Do Stuff

Start Activity

This is simply the starting point where we collect the data via an "Entity" that was passed to the Workflow and then conditionally decide if we want to activate the "Do Stuff" activity if the person was a first time guest. It has three actions to accomplish this.

Here are the details of each of those actions.

The Attribute Set From Entity action takes the entity (which we know is a "Person" type entity that comes from the New Family block) and puts it into our local Person attribute. (Note: In my Puzzling Rock Block's session, I was using a block that passed a Group Member type entity. So to extract the person from it, I used {{ Entity.Person.PrimaryAlias.Guid }} to get the necessary Guid of the person's alias.)

Next is a Lava Run action that pulls the person's "Is First Time" attribute value (Boolean) and puts it into our local Is First Time Guest attribute.

Last is an Activate Activity action that activates our "Do Stuff" activity -- but only if the person is a first time guest. Note the use of the "Run If" which controls if the action will execute or not.   When a Run If is enabled, it highlights the action's indicator with a peach color to let you know if may or may not run based on a condition.

If the person is not a first time guest, the workflow completes because there are no more actions in this activity.

Do Stuff Activity

Now we'll look at the Do Stuff activity in detail. It has three actions to accomplish the following:

1. Store the date of the previous Sunday onto the person's First Visit attribute.
2. Send a welcome email.
3. Open a new follow-up connection request.
   

Here are the details of each of those actions.

This uses the Person Attribute Set action to store a value of the date of the previous Sunday into the person's First Visit attribute.

Next is the Send Welcome Email, which uses the Email Send action to send the custom email along with some Lava to get the person's NickName, etc.

Last we'll uses the Connection Request Create action to add a new connection request to the opportunity we set earlier in an workflow attribute.

That's it. Once you set the New Family block setting to use this new workflow, as new families are entered they will trigger your new workflow and all your new automation will be handling all the busy work.

This is only one way to create a First Time Guest workflow.  There's no right or wrong way, so get creative and make it your own.

As you saw at RX 2018, there's no short supply of people who want to help you be a super hero at your church. So, if you have any questions about any of this, just jump into our Slack community or post your question to the Ask pages.