A single Broadcast is a one-step process: You send a Broadcast asking somebody to do something, or informing them of something, and that’s it.

You might run Broadcasts every day, message hundreds of people and send reminders, but it’s still a single step.

What if you want to build a longer-running process that has multiple tasks carried out by different people with dependencies between them?

In other words, a workflow. 💡

Broadcasts can be used to build long-running and multi-stage workflows. It can even be used to build conditional workflows that route work differently according to some predefined logic or condition. The key is to combine multiple Broadcasts into a single process.

This means building a Broadcast for each step of the process and building dependencies between them. There are no formal dependencies in the Broadcast configuration, but the filter condition of one Broadcast can be set to the expected output of another.

For example, you might have a Broadcast that looks for new candidate Projects added to a project list and then routes an approval survey to a team member to review and approve (or reject!) them.

The first Broadcast may have a filter rule that looks for new projects created in the past week.

You can then set up a second Broadcast that uses the expected output of the first Broadcast as its filter rule.

In this case, after receiving the project submission from the first Broadcast the project approver will then review the project using a survey and set an Approval Flag to ‘Yes’ if she approves the project along with a Review Date.

A second Broadcast can then be set up that looks for newly-reviewed projects with an Approval Flag set to ‘Yes’ and sends a message to the person submitting the project that their project has been approved.

But what if it’s not approved? In this case, you want to build a conditional step into the workflow.

You can do this by copying and editing the second Broadcast to create a third Broadcast that deals with the ‘No’ condition. Again, it looks for newly-reviewed projects, but this time with the Approval Flag set to ‘No’.

Then it may send the project survey back to the submitter of the project asking them to add more information - for example, by providing more details on the project’s business case.

The key to building a workflow is making sure the filter rules and schedules work together across the end-to-end process.

For example, if you want the end-to-end flow to run weekly, then you’ll need to design both the filter rules and the schedules of each step to pick up that week’s changes and pass them along to the next step in the workflow.

For more information on working with timing in Broadcasts, see Working with Timing in Broadcasts.