Managing Gravity Forms with Zapier and Trello

If you’re looking to organize your Gravity Forms contact submissions, I’ve got just the trick for you.

I connect my general Contact form and my Challenge application forms to my Trello account with Zapier.

I use Trello for organizing thoughts and tasks, so why not use it to organize all of the folks contacting me. With it’s ease of use and drag-n-drop lists, it makes for a really great lightweight CRM of sorts.

For those of you that haven’t used any of these services, let’s take a look at what they do before I share the recipe.

Gravity Forms

If you’ve spent any time in the WordPress space, you’ve probably heard of Gravity Forms.

It’s the most regarded contact form system, positioned as much more than just a simple contact form plugin. With it’s great collection of add-ons, specifically this Zapier add-on integration we’re covering  today, it’s proven that we can do a lot with capturing data on our WordPress site.

Zapier

Zapier makes it easy for you to make web apps talk to one another. In this case, Gravity tells Zapier when a form is submitted and then Zapier tells Trello. There’s a boat load of services you can trigger based on actions and I’m only really scratching the surface here.

Theres a free account, so sign up and play around with it. If you’re like me, your braincell’s are going to start firing off when you think about what it can do for you or your clients.

Trello

I was a die hard fan of Basecamp for years.

Lived it, breathed it, and paid $100 a month for it. Then I met Trello and never went back and migrated everything over to the service.

I plan on writing more about how we use Trello at Slocum Studio because I can hear the 37Signals diehards now. I didn’t shift over just because it’s free, but because it’s super clean, intuitive and real time. That last part is super important and we’ll talk more about it later.

You organize  your project on a board, then create lists within the board. Lists contain cards, which contain all the data you want in it. Sub lists, files, conversations, link to Dropbox etc. Really quite amazing.

Connecting the 3 services

Install Zapier add-on

First, you will have to grab your Zapier add-on and install it under your Gravity Forms settings page.

Once this is enabled, each Gravity Form will have a Zapier webhook that you need to enter under settings. You’re going to need to copy and paste this webhook here once you get into Zapier.

Note: You will need the Developer level license of Gravity in order to access this Zapier add-on. For most folks it’s worth it if you’re installing a lot of forms. 

Configure Zapier

Take a look at that screenshot — fairly obvious what’s going on here right?

When a Gravity Forms is submitted, we will trigger a Trello Card creation. Simple.

I’m going to skip ahead to one of my completed zaps so you can see how I structure the passing of data. It’s amazing what you can tap into here, so spend a few minutes playing around and thinking about the opportunity.

Here’s what this is doing:

1. When a submission comes from my Gravity Forms “Contact Form Submissions”
2. Shoot it over to my Trello list “Incoming”
3. Labeled with the card title of “Name” which is the name field of my form
4. Now spit the data fields Email Topic Website and the comment into the card

The end result

Here’s a view of what my November looks like.

Everything flows into “Incoming Contact” and then I drag and drop them into their respective lists. I delete the cards I don’t need to keep or come through as spam and archive the cards that have sent me suggestions.

So here’s where you can see the magic begin to happen or even start to use Trello as a simple CRM system for your own business. I can move cards around to their different status positions which helps a ton when I’m organizing the Challenge which is a logistics nightmare.

Eventually I need to upgrade my Helpscout account to premium in order to enable API access. I use Helpscout for managing all my responses for this site which is great for my consulting side of the house.

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