Scheduling Report Exports to Email or External Systems
Introduction
The Schedule feature within AdvocateHub Reports provides the ability to send data to external parties or systems in a multitude of formats. This function has a few uses cases, the most common being the following:
Stakeholder Updates
- Keeping stakeholders apprised of your AdvocateHub program's key metrics
- Sharing information such as survey responses with other teams
Upload to External Systems
- Incorporating data from your AdvocateHub program into business intelligence platforms such as Tableau or Domo
- Storing AdvocateHub engagement data in an external database such as MySQL or MongoDB
Scheduling Reports
Every report and dashboard within AdvocateHub can be scheduled for export to a number of services. In this section, we'll walk through how to do this as well as the various options one is presented with when scheduling an export.
Setting up a schedule
- Find the report or dashboard that you would like to schedule - it can be either a Custom or Standard report/dashboard.
- Hover over the top area of the report/dashboard. This should reveal the gear icon to the right of the Run button.
- Click on the gear, then click on "Schedule..."
This will reveal a host of options, which we will discuss in detail below.
Data destinations
Currently, there are eight options for data destinations: Email, Webhook, Amazon S3, SFTP, Dropbox, Google Drive, Good Sheets, Zapier.
The Email, Webhook and Zapier options open up the possibilities to include a vast number of destinations. Many databases and Business Intelligence platforms accept data ingest through email attachments or Webhooks. Further, sending your data to Zapier also expands the potential integrations to include the thousands of applications supported in that service.
How is the data formatted?
Each destination has unique options with regards to how the data can be formatted. Please refer to the table below.
| Destination | Available Data Formats | |
| Data Table (HTML table within email), Visualization (PNG file), CSV, XLSX, JSON Simple, Text (TXT file), HTML (separate HTML file with table) | ||
| Webhook | CSV, XLSX, Text (TXT file), HTML (separate HTML file with table), JSON - Simple, JSON - Label, JSON - Simple, Inline, JSON - Detailed, Inline | |
| Amazon S3 | CSV, XLSX, JSON - Simple, JSON - Detailed, Inline | |
| SFTP | CSV, XLSX, JSON - Simple, JSON - Detailed, Inline |
|
| Dropbox | CSV, XLSX, Text (TXT file), HTML (separate HTML file with table), JSON - Simple, JSON - Label, JSON - Simple, Inline, JSON - Detailed, Inline | |
| Google Drive | CSV, XLSX, Text (TXT file), HTML (separate HTML file with table), JSON - Simple, JSON - Label, JSON - Simple, Inline, JSON - Detailed, Inline | |
| Google Sheets | CSV | |
| Zapier | CSV | |
Scheduling Options
Reports and Dashboards can be scheduled for the following repeating intervals:
- Daily - every day, weekdays only, or specific days at a specific time of day
- Weekly - every week on a specific day at a specific time of day
- Monthly - every month, at the beginning of the quarter, or in specific months on a specific date at a specific time of day
- Hourly - every 1 through 12 hours at a specified minute between a specified time range
- By minute - ever 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes between a specified time range
Filters
When you are scheduling a report, it will use the existing filter criteria by default. If you'd like, you may change the criteria using the existing filters. You cannot add new filters at this point. If you wish to add new filters for your scheduled report, you should consider editing the existing report and saving it as a new custom report.
Advanced Options
You can further customer what is included in the report as well as specify criteria for when the report should be sent within the "Advanced Options" section of the scheduling tool.
The available options will be different depending on the destination you are using (i.e. Email vs. Webhook) and the format (i.e. HTML vs. JSON), so look at them carefully.
Send this schedule if
You will see this option on most report formats. It allows you to decide if you want to send a report if the following conditions are met:
- there are either results or no results - Default option. The report will be sent every time as per the schedule
- there are no results - The schedule will only be sent when there are no results returned
- there are results - The schedule will only be sent if there is data in the report
On top of these three options, you will see the checkbox, "and results changed since last run." It is important to understand this to avoid duplicate data being sent (unless this is fine):
- If unchecked, the scheduled report or dashboard will be sent even if the information contained is exactly the same as the last run.
- If checked, the scheduled report or dashboard will only be sent if there are new results since the last run.