Rules

A rule does a routine step on your board the moment something happens. For example: "When a reply is Interested, assign Sam and set a follow-up in 3 days." You write it once. The board follows it from then on.

Rules live in Settings, Rules. The account owner or an admin writes them. Everyone on the team can see them.

What a rule waits for

Each rule waits for one thing:

• Someone replies. You can pick which replies: Interested, a question, No thanks, Not now or Wrong person.
• A card moves stage. A move by a person or by the product counts. A move a rule made doesn't (see No loops).
• A card goes quiet. Nothing has happened on it (no reply, email, note or move) for the number of days you set.
• A partner signs up. You marked an invited affiliate as signed up.
• A follow-up is due. The card's follow-up date has arrived. A date more than three days old is left alone, so switching rules on never acts on follow-ups from months ago.

Quiet cards and due follow-ups are checked once an hour. The rest happen at once.

Only if

You can narrow a rule to some cards. Every part you set has to hold:

• the stage the card is in (or moved to)
• its channel, for example YouTube only
• its owner, or no owner yet
• a list it's on
• a tag it has

What a rule can do

A rule can take up to six steps, in order:

• Move to a stage, or into a lane. Said no and Later ask why, the way a hand move does. No rule moves a card to Live, or out of it: only the hand-off does that.
• Assign the card to a teammate. They get a notice in the bell.
• Set a follow-up a number of days ahead. 0 is today.
• Add the card to a list, or add a tag.
• Queue the affiliate for a campaign. They join a running campaign and wait in its review queue. Nothing goes out until you say yes. Only someone still in Found can join, and anyone who asked not to be contacted is skipped.
• Tell a teammate, or the card's owner, with a notice in the bell.
• Post in your Slack channel, once you've set up Slack alerts in Settings, Integrations. The line names no affiliate.
• Send the affiliate's row to Clay, once Clay is connected. It goes within the hour.

A rule never sends an email

You click every send. A rule can put someone in front of you for review, and that's as far as it goes. Anyone who unsubscribed or asked to be removed is never queued.

Order and conflicts

Rules run top to bottom. Use the arrows to change the order. Sometimes two rules want to move, assign, follow up or queue the same card at once. The first one wins, and the second says it skipped that step. Steps that are already true (the card is already tagged, already in that stage) are skipped too.

Each rule runs once for each thing that happens. A reply that reaches us twice still fires a rule once.

No loops

Something a rule did never starts another rule. If one rule moves a card to Talking terms, a second rule that waits for "a card moves to Talking terms" doesn't fire from it. So two rules can never pass a card back and forth.

What you'll see

• On the board, a card a rule moved says Moved by a rule for a day.
• In the activity feed, each rule that did something writes one line with the rule's name.
• In Settings, each rule shows how many times it ran and when it last did.

Starter rules

Three rules switch on in one click:

• Take every interested reply: assigns the card to you and sets a follow-up in 2 days.
• Come back to not-now replies in a month: sets a follow-up in 30 days.
• Catch a deal going quiet: when a card in Talking terms is quiet for 5 days, sets a follow-up for today and tells the owner.

How many rules

Launch has room for three rules, Grow for 25. That counts every brand on your account, and a rule that's turned off still counts, so delete one to make room. The server checks this too, whatever the screen shows.