Zapier Integration Now in Beta
I’d never heard of Zapier until someone asked if CA integrated with it. There is a veritable sea of other apps I might make CA integrate with, quite impractical to do them all and certainly not to be done in response to only one request, and so I tucked the idea away for the time being.
And then eventually I got another request. And then another. And then several more.
By about the third person to ask I gave it a good look and very much liked the premise: integrating with Zapier, it turns out, is not so much integrating with one app, but rather is a gateway to near-effortless integrations with a whole ecosystem of other apps.
Zapier makes it possible for your average person (specifically, NON-programmers) to make two different apps to talk to one another in order to accomplish certain tasks of automation, and with no programming necessary. These include tasks of the form “when X happens over here, make it do Y over there”, like for example “When someone schedules an appointment with me from my WuFoo form, add it as an event to my Google Calendar.”
With the CoachAccountable API, CA is ripe for being one of the apps that can be integrated with others via Zapier. I hadn’t yet made it a priority as of this past week, until just the other day I got another request for it, this time via chat from one Louise Beattie of Working a Better Life.
“Hey, since I’ve got you here, would you mind telling me specifically what you would use it for?” I asked. She said she’d like to have it so that clients she added to CoachAccountable would be automatically added to her mailing list within ActiveCampaign.
Hmmm… “Are you going to be online for a little while? I’d be happy to cook that up for you if you’d be willing to be my guinea pig on this, and let me know how it was working for you.” I explained more or less how I myself wasn’t a Zapier user and so somewhat flying blind about the whole thing. She was game.
So it was then that I spent some time putting the finishing touches on some toying around I’d done earlier, motivated by being able to serve a real and specifically requested use case. Fun!
Even in this super early phase, this totally works, and is one of many MANY possible tasks that could be setup.
Louise was offline by the time I had things ready to go (being 7 hours ahead of me in the UK I suppose I might’ve suspected that) but the next day I’d got confirmation that the setup was a working success.
CoachAccountable as a Zapier app is now in invite-only mode. Again, flying blind as I am (and more to the point, not myself chomping at the bit with specific integration needs), I’m leaving it up to users of both Zapier & CoachAccountable to guide in what would be useful, and the functionality of what can be easily setup via Zapier will grow and evolve in accordance with requests.
For example, two weeks ago another coach said this:
I’d love to have some rules fire when a new coaching client is added. Like connecting on LinkedIn, Facebook, maybe tie it in to a service that ships a card or brownies.
Automated brownie sending to new clients–nice! I take it as proof positive that there’s a lot of room for creative ideas in this space.
If you’re a Zapier user and would like to link your CoachAccountable account to it for whatever purposes of automation with other systems you use, you can! You’ll not find CA in the Zapier app directory yet, but you can connect it via this invite link:
https://zapier.com/developer/invite/29519/b40a6c79d29336524e270178ecba2252/
My thanks to Louise for being the well-timed push that got me finally really rolling on this front!
More recently: Why Group Metrics Are Awesome
Previously: Introducing CA Mobile
I have to confess I was the person who chatted to John about this just yesterday, and once again I am utterly delighted at how responsive John is to continually improving Coach Accountable and supporting his clients.
I am not a heavy user of CA yet as my business is in it’s early days, but believe me I looked at a lot of alternatives when I did my research for a tool that I could use to support my coaching clients. I have been very happy with my choice of CA and have had great feedback from my clients about using the system.
As for the Zapier integration. I am just getting my head around Zapier too, but the integration was very easy and it works just as it says it does. I am still trying to figure out the best way to get the most out of this integration, beyond adding new clients / updating them in Active Campaign, but the possibilities are many.
And as for sending your new clients brownies automatically – I need to find a service that does that and will integrate via Zapier, because I recently received a surprise gift of card and brownies from someone I had purchased from and it made my day! Just saying…
And if anyone happens to read this who is sitting on the fence about Coach Accountable – jump in and give it a try, you won’t be disappointed. Yes, I have become a bit of a fan girl, but that has been well and truly earned by John and Coach Accountable.
October 31, 2015 @ 12:12 pm
Zapier – yes, yes and yes. As a past Infusionsoft CP and now a devotee to Drip, I want to use CoachAccountable tied in with Drip and in some cases, Google Docs to facilitate a timed release of course material. I have an expert partner who one day I am sure would like to play with the CoachAccountable API but the business is very early stages. But if you hook into Zapier, the world is our oyster. Thanks
October 6, 2016 @ 10:52 pm
Hi David,
Sweet! I’ll send you an invite link. Funny you should mention the likes of InfusionSoft and Drip, as CoachAccountable Courses for many folks serves as a drip feed engine for content, messaging and more, often taking the place of those drip campaign programs entirely. Give ’em a try!
October 7, 2016 @ 8:18 am
Did this ever get integrated? I am not seeing AC it in the zapier results…
November 7, 2019 @ 10:06 am
Hi Nate,
CoachAccountable’s not in the Zapier app directory yet, but it’s still available via the invite link.
Now that I think about it there’s no real reason not to make that readily available–I’ll add it to the post above. :)
November 8, 2019 @ 1:31 pm
Hi. I have CoachAccountable connected to Zapier. I’m trying to work-around two issues that I encountered in CoachAccountable. One is, the notification templates are not separated by Appointment Type, and I have Appointment Types where I don’t want clients to be able to cancel their own appointments (which I would be creating manually in the first place). But in order to create the workaround, I would need a Trigger Event of “Session Cancelled”. Is this on the roadmap of being added? I also need to be able to identify when a Specific Offering is purchased. Do you offer a Zapier guide that will tell me if each invoice will only ever have ONE “Line Item Set Item”? I don’t want to rely on that as a filter looking for the Offering, if there could potentially be multiple Line Item Set Items. And with the enumeration displayed in Zapier, it does in fact look like there can be multiple “Set Items” per invoice. Thank you!
September 13, 2021 @ 11:40 am
Hi Andrea,
There’s actually no need for any workaround to that first issue: any Appointment Types that you don’t want your clients to be able to cancel can be set with a cancellation policy that requires a really long advance time. “Permitted until 999 days before” for example does the trick. :)
As for identifying when a specific Offering is purchased, you can set whichever email recipients to be notified that you like for a given Offering, which could do to pretty well for even scripted automation AND allow you to avoid the complexity of Zapier to manage it.
September 13, 2021 @ 4:13 pm