What are integrations?
Hearken's Engagement Management System is a platform that enables our clients to engage with their stakeholders efficiently and at scale.
Successful community building and tracking success of your engagement efforts require syncing data among various systems. For instance, you may want to sync email addresses of your customers who signed up for a newsletter to your email campaign system.
We enable such data transfers and syncing via integrations.
What systems do you integrate with?
At Hearken, we understand that our clients have preferred systems and workflows and that these systems change and adapt over time.
So we designed our integrations to be agnostic of the systems that we send data to.
Our integrations serve data in a format that we established. Our clients have the option of connecting the integration channels to their systems using a middleman such as Zapier or by creating a custom integration by writing their own code.
We do, however, have a direct integration with Mailchimp.
What integrations are available?
Webhooks send a single unit of information such as one question, one vote or one audience member to another app or trigger an action in that app. With an API you request the EMS for information. But with a Webhook, the EMS sends you the information you registered to receive, to a location you register with us. These Webhooks are sent when certain events happen—like when a new question is added or one is edited. When you create a Webhook, you can choose what event you want to trigger what action in what app.
APIs allows you, our user, to request data in bulk from us. eg: All questions since yesterday, all audience members who have contributed more than 3 questions, etc.
When using an API, you use an API key in lieu of your username and password. While we build our self-serve interface for getting the key, you can get a key by emailing us at support@wearehearken.com
What data is in these integrations?
On the EMS we have three kinds of entities or data types—questions, audience members and votes. Everything else revolves around these three.
Our integrations points are set to send info on these three independently. See the documentation for more info.
What can I do with these integrations?
If you have ever wondered if there is a way to connect data from the EMS into another system, then that is a possibility with our integrations.
Our clients have used these integrations to power a number of workflows.
Send custom slack messages to a channel or person when a question is asked
Send an automatic thank you email to question askers
Add questions to Google Sheets
Add emails from newsletter signups into email management systems like MailChimp, Pardot, Campaign Monitor, etc.
Add emails to CRM such as Salesforce, hubspot, etc.
Why do I need a middleman like Zapier?
Our data format is designed to be independent of the end use or system. We have established a standard data schema or convention that is carried throughout our integrations. But this could mean that the data we send is not exactly in the format your system expects. A service like Zapier can take data from one system and convert it to the right format needed by another system. You can do the same thing by writing some custom code. Zapier makes it easier.