RX 24 - Automating Reference Check Requests with Workflows - Jennifer Troeger

Transcribed Content

Alrighty. Good afternoon. Now, I would like you to welcome Jennifer Traeger, and we're going to hear about automating reference check requests workflows. All right. Hey, everybody. Thanks for coming. As you can see, my name's Jennifer Traeger. I am the database director at Kensington Church. Kensington is based out of Metro Detroit, Michigan. We have six campuses. I work remotely. I live in South Carolina. I'll start by giving you a little bit of information about me and this presentation. Not that my history is really important, but I'm a wife coming up on my thirtieth wedding anniversary this year, mom to two daughters, a new grandma. I have a four month old grandson. I've been with Kensington since 02/2005 in many different roles. What this presentation is about is we have a system where we vet our volunteers, which many of you do. But we also I'll go back to that. This is about sending out those reference requests as part of the vetting process. So some people, you may or may not do that, but if you don't vet your volunteers through reference requests as well as a background check, then this still might be adaptable in another circumstance. And I just wanted to come here and share it with you today because we found it to be a time saving process, and I figured everybody can benefit from saving time when they can and use your resources elsewhere. So when I first started this project, what I had in mind, I first started by thinking, someone out there probably has already done this or something similar to this. And so I went and started asking my rock peeps first, hey, do you have this? And I got a lot of response of no, but it sounds kind of cool, so maybe do that. And then I went through Rocket Chat, and then I ended up going back and looking at some old rock conference sessions, and I came across Mark Wampler's twenty twenty one session about workflows and query string parameters. So it's kind of a generic topic, but in the process of watching his presentation, I found the foundation of what I wanted to do and didn't know how to do because I had this great vision, and I knew I was stuck on one particular element, and it actually is that query string parameter. So finding his presentation and the content was what I equate to finding the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. So I want to give credit to Mark because really, I would have been lost without finding that. So my objective was to make this process simpler and more time efficient for our staff members. We have The way our church is structured is we have one staff member who vets all volunteers across all ministries at all of our campuses. Now, though I built this for her, I want you to know that it doesn't have to be based on a single role doing this. So just giving you perspective, but don't think it has to be that way for you. I wanted to make it so that she could launch a workflow from the connection request that would then send out a form to the reference where they can respond to the questions about the volunteer. So we're asking them, do you think this person is fit to serve in ministry? And then the responses would come back into our system. We can review them in an email format. And then it would also store the responses on the volunteer's profile. And it will track it as they come in back on the connection request as well. So what I did is I added a little badge, and it will count up as those references come in. Now, number three, I also allowed for manual entry because we do have some people, some reference people who will just come back and say, can you just call me? Can I just talk to you and give you the answers? And then they're going to jot down either on a notepad and then enter them, the staff person will enter it, or pull it up and kind of enter it as they go on the way, as they talk to them. And I see a couple of people taking pictures. I want you to know that I'm giving you all my content. So everything is in PDF form. I'll give you that. I'm exporting all my workflows and the badge lava as well. So if you can't read content, if some of the content gets small, don't worry about it. I'll either repeat it for you, or you can download the PDF and read it then. I don't want you to feel like you have to capture everything because I'm just going to give it all to you. Also, want to throw out a disclaimer. This is really new for us. I signed up to give this presentation before it was actually complete. So I just built it in May. We're working through a couple of kinks. Also, just because this is what is currently working for us doesn't mean that it's the only or best solution out there. I know that there are many tools that Rock gives us. And so you might think of some way to make this work better or differently, and that's great. I encourage you to think out of the box and also share it back into the community. And I would also love to hear if you have any nuggets that you think of ways I could improve my own process. Before starting the process, before you actually want to implement this, I have a couple suggestions of what you might want to do. Start by creating the fields, the attribute fields, where you want to store information as it comes back into you. So for me, this is for us, it is the reference name, the reference date, which is the date they complete it. And then I have an attribute field to store a PDF of those responses because the workflow will bring it back in, convert it to PDF, and upload it back to the volunteer's profile so you can always have access to it. Number two, you might want to create a new attribute category where you can isolate those attributes on a particular profile page. And I'll give you screenshots of all this as I go on. I also created a badge, so you could create the badge in advance. I give you all the code, and I'll walk you through that. And then you will need to create a dedicated workflow page where the form will display for this person. So notes, diving a little deeper, notes about that workflow entry page. When you're creating the page, you don't need to set the actual workflow type on the workflow entry block because it's going to be passed in through the URL. So I typed it out. You can see what it looks like where I also created a page route under the advanced settings tab of the page. And then you will want to go in to the workflow. And this is for your system. As you implement it, you'll want to go in and update the path in case you can see in there where it starts with application slash. So it would be like your URL, HTTPS blah, blah, blah, your church name slash application and then everything else. So if you don't have a dedicated path for application, you might want to adjust that to your particular settings. This is a screenshot of that isolated attribute block, the attribute category block. So this actually shows we have a page in our profile for just the volunteer application. And then on the side of that page, we have the attribute category for the reference checks. It's references received sent and received. And so at the top, you can see we've got reference one, reference two, and reference three. And as the workflow launches, it will record the name of the person that the reference is sent to. And then as the reference response comes back in, it will actually update the name in case either they use a nickname or, say, for example, husband decides to fill out the form instead of wife or whatever. Who actually returns the response? It will update that name, and it will set the reference date. And then if it's received, it will convert it to a PDF, and then you'll have that little View button. So let me see if I go oh, Okay, moving on. This is what the badge looks like on a connection request. So down there in the right hand corner, it says references received one. So as the references come in, it will count up. So it will start with a zero, and the zero will be red. And then as one comes in, it will turn to orange. And then for two and three, it's green. And again, you can change this. The reason we have that is we send out three reference requests. And if we get two back, we call it good. So green is good for us. So now I'm going to go back to the beginning and show you what the process looks from the inside for a staff member. So here, they're going to start at the connection request. And we have available workflow set on the connection request. We have a manual entry, which is for the phone interview. And then we have the automated button, which will send out the questions, the form, either in an email or a text message. So for the manual reference entry, this is what the staff member is going to see. It's specifically only for those times when they're talking on the phone, taking notes, whatever. When they click the button, it will open up the workflow in a new tab. The volunteer's name is automatically pre populated because it's launching from the connection request. One caveat to this, which maybe there's a better way to do this, but the staff member does need to go back to the, before they do this, they have to go to the volunteer's profile to look to see what slots are open. So remember I showed you it's reference one, reference two, and reference three. If they want to specifically fill in the reference one slot, they need to enter that on this form here. Because if there's already information there, it's going to overwrite it. So we don't want to do that. So that's why I'm saying maybe there's a better way to do that, but that's kind of a manual thing that they have to do here. Also, do I have another so yes, here I'm showing you we have two forms, one that sends out questions if they're working with kids and students. And then we have a more generic, shorter form where we ask fewer questions if they're working in any other ministry. So you may have multiple forms for different ministries. This is something else that you would need to adapt for your circumstance. But on this form, I have the question asking if this volunteer is working with kids or students, and then there's filter logic behind it that will drop down those additional questions so that the staff person can ask the questions. So the automated reference request. Again, it will open up a new workflow form in a new tab. It will pre populate the information pulling from the volunteer application. So we store our volunteer application as person attributes. So as that comes in, it's still stored on the profile, but the connection request is pulling that from their profile, populating. If they gave us three, then three are entered. Maybe they only gave two. The staff member can see this, have visual eyes on it, make sure there's no typos, because we all know everybody does a .con instead of a .com. Also, there's the option for email address and cell phone number. So if our staff member decides they want to send out both methods at the same time, so send out an email and a text message, they can leave those fields populated. If they decide they don't want to send a text message, they would just delete it from that field. It doesn't delete it from the attribute. It's only deleting it from this form. But then when the workflow launches, it knows to only send an email and not a text message. So now we're going to go behind the scenes and look inside the workflow. Again, I know my text is going to get smaller as I go, so ask me if you want me to read anything that it says. But again, I'm giving you everything. You'll be able to see it if you download. So I did mention that we have two different types of workflows that will launch depending on whether or not they're working with children or not. And that is based off of filter logic on our connection opportunities. So we know we only have for our setup this is based off of our connection type. When someone wants to serve with Kensington, they have six boxes to choose from. And so based on that, behind us is the filter logic to launch one workflow or the other. So the way it's set up, we don't have an overlap where one box would send to either or. It's literally just going to be the kids or just be the generic form that goes out. And so again, this is configurable on your system and the way your connection opportunity is set up. I did want to highlight that in the filter connection, when you're setting your filter, it's based on the GUID of your connection opportunity and not the ID. So you'll want to grab the GUID. Then from there, the workflow will determine how many subsequent workflows to launch based off of the first name field. So if they only entered a first name for two people, then it's only going to launch two workflows, one for each person. So again, if it's one name and they want to send it to email and text, that's still only one workflow. But if the first name field is blank on the third one, it won't send anything to that person. So most likely, if someone's giving you reference information and they don't have part of a name, they're going to at least have the first name. That's why it's based off of that. The workflow is going to pass on several attributes. Actually, I take that back. The connection request is going to pass on several attributes into the workflow this volunteer name, who it's requested by. So this is why I said, even though we have one person who does all of this, whoever is clicking that button is going to be set as the staff person making the request. So it doesn't matter that you might have 10 people sending this out. If they're the ones to click the button, they will be the person to get the response back. And it's also their name that is signed at the bottom of the email that goes out. So it's personalized to them based on who's logged in and using the form. The connection opportunity is passed through, reference first name, reference last name, email, connection request. It does note whether it's in the number one, two, or three slot and their cell phone. This is the 30,000 foot view of what the workflow looks like. Again, really small text. It's just to give you an overview. The details of it don't really matter at this point, but I wanted you to have this for reference if you want to look at the PDF at some point. Otherwise, it's going to all download into your system. So we're going to dig deeper a little bit. The workflow starts by setting the attributes, And then it allows for a delay after five days. It send it'll send a reminder at five days, and then it'll set another delay. It does that delay twice. So it's a reminder at five days, a reminder at ten days. And then it does set for fourteen days. But fourteen days, if it hits that fourteen day mark and it has not already completed, then it's going to say, we got nothing. Let's just close it out and wipe out those it'll clear the attribute fields where it had made note of who it was sent to. And then they can either make that decision of, I need to reach out to another reference, or it's Okay because we already got two responses back. Then it'll move on to emailing or texting the reference or both. And then as it comes back in, so that's going to send a URL to the reference. So the reference is going to get this email with a hyperlink in it. That's going to open up a workflow in our system that's connected back to this volunteer, but they don't know it. So they'll complete that. Once they hit Submit, it moves on to reference one update, reference two update, or reference three update, at which point it's saying, is this really still the first person's name? Okay, update that. Let's mark the date that it came in, and let's convert it to a PDF and upload that as well. But wait, there's more. Oh, what we did also is part of the email or text activity, it will make a note on that connection request saying emailed so and so. So again, it's another reminder when that staff person, when any staff person is looking at that connection request and wondering, what have I done? Have I done this already? Oh, yeah, look, it recorded an activity and said that I did send out the reference request to this person, this person, and this person. When it comes back in, after it's updating reference one, reference two, reference three, it's going to notify the staff member, which when it does that, it's going to send an email to the staff member, and it's going to have all the responses written out for them. Because we want, as part of our organization, we want that staff member to read all the responses and make sure that just because the form was completed doesn't mean that they're good to serve. So you actually have to read the responses, So we just lay it right out there for them in the email, as well as converting it to the PDF and uploading it. Oh, and I noted there about the reminder as well. And then here is if it goes to the fourteen days where it wants to complete it, saying we never got a response, it will remove reference one, reference two, or reference three based on whatever slot that was in. This is what the email looks like. The content, again, is in the workflow. You're going to want to update it for your own header for your organization, change the content. And like I said, it will pre populate the person's name at the bottom. So you're going to want to I think I did hard code Kensington Church in there. So you're going to want to maybe change that to your organization name or use Lava or whatever. And then same thing, this is what the text message looks like. The content for the text message is all stored in one attribute field within the workflow. So I'm pointing that out because it might be a little confusing if you want to edit the text in both places, edit that verbiage. You're going to be like, where is it? Go up to the attributes. It's a memo field. Click Edit on that memo, and there it will be. But it is, in this case, the same content. This is the Lava Badge code, which is a text file that I have available to download, so don't worry about anything. But you can see here one thing I want to point out that is unique to us, so you may want to change this, is I have this code for if reference checked is not yes. So we have an attribute field where it is manually set by the staff person that says, yes, references are checked. By default, it's blank, right? So there's no it's not no, it's blank. So if it's yes, then there's no badge. It doesn't even bother. But if it's not yes, then it will count up for you. So you will want to either remove that or change that. And the reason we have it manual is, again, because we want our staff person to read those responses. So that's a sign of, yep, they're good to go. I have personally reviewed them. So I do have takeaways. However, I have not seen where the takeaways are available to you yet through the app. If they make them available through the app, you're going to have it there. If not, if doesn't become available through the conference, I will drop it in the Rocket Chat for the conference so you have them. All of this is a SharePoint link. So I didn't put it here because it's really long and not pretty. But I wanted you to know that all of this is available to you to download. So there's the reference request workflow, the manual reference form, the reference form workflow for the kids and students questions, reference form for generic, and then the Lava Badge as well. And then I made a point, remember my questions might be different from your questions. So don't forget to change that as well. All right, Here is where I'm throwing it out to you. What time are we at? 03:30. We have a couple minutes for questions. Also, my contact information, I'm happy to DM you the link as well to the SharePoint so you can download everything. I wanna make sure that everybody who wants it can have it, or you can email me directly. I am happy to respond that way as well. Does anybody have any questions?