Solution

Goals

Problem

Deliverables

The organization had no standardized way of storing and approving Meeting Excusals. This left members frustrated as they often did not know if their excuse had been approved until after the meeting had already taken place. In the cases of rejected excuses, this meant members were being fined without the opportunity to rearrange their prior commitments.

The introduction of a Zapier workflow which is triggered when an Excuse is marked as Approved / Rejected in a central, cloud based spreadsheet. This workflow would notify the member about the decision of their excuse.

To introduce a Zapier Workflow which will send dynamic, automated emails to the member to notify them of the decision of a meeting excusal in a consistent, standardized way.

  • Clearer and a more transparent process of excuse approval

  • A reduction in time spent by the Secretary messaging members about the decision of their excuse

  • Faster decision times

  • A reduction in fines due to missed meetings

Meeting Excusal Decision Notification

The Zapier Workflow

Workflow Breakdown

1: The Approve / Reject Trigger
Excuse Approved Path

  1. If the majority of the board vote to approve the excuse, write an email to the member saying their excuse has been approved and they will not be fined. Pull the member name, email, meeting date and reason for absence from the spreadsheet containing data populated from the submission form.

Excuse Rejected Path

  1. If the majority of the board vote to reject the excuse, write an email to the member saying their excuse has been rejected and failure to attend will result in a fine. Pull the member name, email, meeting date and reason for absence from the spreadsheet containing data populated from the submission form.

  1. Meeting Excusals are sent through a Google Form which automatically populates a Google Sheet as seen above. When a Excuse Google Form is submitted, all members of the Board are notified and asked to place their vote. By controlling access permissions and locking cells, only the specific member can vote in their cell, they can not access other cells to vote. This is an essential feature to ensure the voting process keeps its integrity. The workflow triggers when a majority vote is met as represented in the vote column. This is calculated using the formula "=IFS(Q2 > 4, "Approve", R2 > 4, "Reject", AND( Q2 < 5, R2 < 5), " ")", where Q2 is the number of approved votes, and R2 is the number of rejected votes. If a majority is not met, the cell remains Blank to ensure that the workflow only triggers when there is a change in the Vote Column.