Systemic Issues

As is the case often, personal information of all kinds are typically blocked, or forgotten about when customer or contact information is sampled from many different systems.

One such system is called kvCORE. It's a real estate crm and like many others it connects to Zapier and other things.

Typically, events like birthdays and anniversaries are handled digitally in these systems. By text or email. Of course when it comes to maintaining our various kinds of relationships, a physical piece of mail will always be the best bet.

The problem is pretty obvious. From the perspective of a system designer, If we can do everything we need to do in our system, why would our clients need to do these things outside of it?

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Identifying The Problem

Normally, the best way to automate birthday cards is to simply add your contact to a mailing list at the time you acquire their details. The birthday mailing campaign available in thanks.io makes easy work of this. It merely looks at their birthday and sends 8 days in advance of it. You can see the birthday record (MM/DD, optional /YY)is available to store in thanks.io here:

The problem is that though you can schedule birthday events in kvCORE, if you try to ingest either new contacts or campaign events from kvCORE...

This is the result:

To cut right to the chase, there is no birthday date associated with this contact record. Even if it existed in kvCORE, it would be inaccessible to us whenever the automated campaign in kvCORE fired, we would not be able to schedule and mail a handwritten birthday card from thanks.io.

I want to make it clear, this problem is not really unique to kvCORE, many systems are just as complex and have just as many gaps in them.

A Workaround

Fortunately, Zapier can help us along a bit here. We may not know this person's birthday, but we can calculate it.

First: Smart Campaign Setup

Begin by creating a campaign similar to this. Set the trigger to run 10 days before their birthday.

Next: Set Zapier Action

Next, we will configure a Zapier action to run IMMEDIATELY, since it's already being triggered in advance of their actual birthday.

Finally: Calculate The Date

Now we have an event that we know is happening exactly 10 days before the date we want to know. So, we simply have to add an intermediary step in Zapier to ask "what is the date 10 days from now?"

Start by adding a formatter step to your Zap, right after the kvCORE campaign trigger.

Choose 'Date/Time' as the 'Event.'

After clicking 'Continue' select 'Add/Subtract Time' as your transform.

• In the 'Input' field it wants to know what date to calculate. So, we will use a special Zapier variable: {{meta_human_datetime_now}}
• Below that, type '+10 Days' in the expression field.
• And finally, select MM/DD/YY as the format.

That's basically it! Now you know their birthday. When adding the recipient to a Mailing List in thanks.io, just choose the date from the formatter step:

Now the records added to this list will have birthdays, and you can use the built-in thanks.io birthday campaign to fulfill your kvCORE birthday card needs!

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