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Zapier is a web service designed to connect other web services to each other. It acts as a kind of bridge, and it can take data streaming in from your SurveyCTO forms and trigger a wide variety of possible actions: you could send SMS's or emails, route the incoming data into other database or visualization systems, and much more. A single submission coming in from a SurveyCTO form can even trigger a series of different actions via Zapier.

For videos and more information, check out our support article Creating automated systems with Zapier.

Step one: Setting up the SurveyCTO side

1. Ensure cloud publishing is turned on.

   In your server console's Export tab, scroll down to the Advanced: publishing form and dataset data to the cloud section, and ensure the ON/OFF toggle is set to ON.

2. Choose a form to publish.

   To configure any one of your forms to publish to Zapier, click on the Configure option for that form, and then click Add connection in the Zapier section of the panel that appears.

3. Configure the connection.

   You'll first need to choose a good name for your Zapier connection, based on the form and the subset of fields that you intend to publish to Zapier. After that, you'll need to select exactly which form fields to publish (but note that, for encrypted forms, only form fields that have been explicitly marked as publishable will be listed). There's a Select all button if you simply want to publish all fields.

   Then, you have a few other options available:

   1. You can choose whether or not to include a hyperlink to the full submission in SurveyCTO, in the data that publishes to Zapier. (If you do include the hyperlink, and you happen to also be publishing a form field named "submission_url", choose a different name for the hyperlink.)
   2. You can check Publish existing data if you want to publish existing form submissions. If you don't check this option, then only new submissions that come in (after you configure publishing) will publish to Zapier.
4. Copy the API key.

   Once you save the new connection details on the SurveyCTO side, you'll be given an API key to use in configuring the connection on the Zapier side. Copy that to your clipboard.

Step two: Setting up the Zapier side

1. Create a Zapier account.

   If you don't already have a Zapier account, you can sign up for free here.

2. Create a new Zap.

   Once logged in to your Zapier account, you should see a button to "Make a Zap!" up at the top of the screen. Click that and select "SurveyCTO" as the trigger app (the app you select in the "When this happens..." section).

3. Authenticate the connection.

   When the time comes to configure your SurveyCTO account on the Zapier side, you'll be prompted for an API key. Just paste in the one you copied from your SurveyCTO console.

4. Configure the "action".

   You have now set up one half of the 'bridge'. Every time a new submission arrives for your form, SurveyCTO will send a notification to Zapier. The second half of the bridge is the "action" or "Do this..." section. This is where you tell Zapier what to do every time it receives that notification.

Zapier has a great tutorial on creating a new Zap. For more informaton about how to configure and use Zapier more generally, please visit their Learning Center.

Publishing

As submissions come in to the server, your selected fields will be automatically published to Zapier – but there will be a brief delay of up to ten minutes.

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