Creating Email Reminders to Complete a Form

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Hello, I created a project that creates tasks based on an intake form. We need our team to complete these on a weekly basis and hoped to have a rule send out a reminder for them to complete their next form.

We do not want our team to have access to this project to see other member’s submissions though.

Based on this, I made the following rules:

  1. When task comes to project from form XX and team member name (custom field) selected is XX, move to section XX and set due day to one week from today (would be ideal to just make this every Friday of the month)
  2. When task due date is approaching (one day before), add comment and tag @TeamMemberName with reminder to go to email.

So, first question is do these rules make the most sense for what I’m trying to do? And second, when do tasks with rules to notify assignee get emailed? I set one up yesterday to test with due date marked as tomorrow but still have not received an email.

Thank you!

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Hi @AmyPeters. Let me see if I can help you.

I think your Rules should work. That said, here are a few other approaches you might consider:

  • Assign a weekly recurring task to each individual. That way they will see the action in their My Tasks and any reminders they have setup for themselves (email or Inbox). You could even place a link to the intake form in the task details. With this approach, it’s also easy for you to see who has completed the task or not with a simple report. Note: you can create these tasks in the same project as your Intake Form results in a unique Section or in a totally different project. Either way, team members don’t need to have access to the project to see the task in their task list.

  • Add a Rule for one day before due Basically, the same as what you’ve done in #2.

  • Add a Rule for overdue. If a team member doesn’t mark the task complete, set an ‘overdue by 3 day’ reminder with an @mention to them, yourself and/or anyone else with a need to know.

  • Send an actual email or slack message. If you use Google as your email provider, you could generate an actual email when one or more of your Rules fire. Similarly with Slack (direct message.)

I’m sure there are other options as well. These are what come to mind for me.

Hope it helps!

@Wayne_Hedlund1

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Thanks Wayne! I could set the recurring task but really want to try to automate this as much as possible so they only have to focus on the reminder email and completing the form - not needing to go in and mark that task complete so it renews for the following week. That being said, I did test the recurring task option on my end and didn’t receive any email notification. I am subscribed to the project and my task assignments so any idea why?

As for option two - yes, that was my original hope. But again, I assigned that task to me yesterday with a due date of tomorrow and still haven’t received an email today with the message. I am not sure if there is a time of day that Asana sends any pending due task reminders and I just haven’t gotten it yet?

Thanks again for some suggestions.

Amy

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That makes sense @AmyPeters.

So the challenge with email notifications is that each individual has to have the correct notifications setup (in Settings) to force Asana to send email notifications. If you don’t want your users to have to go into Asana to see those notifications, but you also don’t want them to be inundated with all the other notifications Asana sends, then I recommend asking them to all set their email notifications to “Mentions Only”.

Email notifications don’t happen for task assignments unless they set their notifications to ‘Activity Updates’ which I don’t recommend since they will get a ton of other notifications, as well.

Regarding your test. I don’t think you’ll get notifications for new tasks you assign to yourself. Only if someone else assigns tasks to you.

And as for your attempt to receive the assigned task from yesterday. Again, check your Notification settings and make sure the Rule includes your @mention.

Hope that helps Amy.

Have a great Wednesday.

Wayne

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Thank you for the help, Wayne! I’ll look into this further with your notes.

Regards,
Amy