Send task status updates to external email address collected from a form.

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Dear Asana,

I have seen several old, somewhat related requests like this and would like to add my voice to support this initiative:

I work in a large company with ~700 Asana users and growing. In such a large group, managing stakeholders via an email address is crucial. I know that this goes against old thinking for Asana, namely that every person who interacts with tasks/projects should be a paying member.

Business Problem: Stakeholders submit a request (feature requests, bug reports, etc.) and never hear back. They want to know what has happened to their request.

Underlying Issue: They would never ‘join’ Asana because their team doesn’t use it. Our company has 26,000 employees — there will always be a massive delta between the ‘in group’ using Asana and the ‘out group’ who needs to feed work to the Asana-using teams.

Preferred solution: We would like task updates to be sent back to the submitter’s email address automatically. They do not need to be able to reply and interact with the task. They just need email updates based on the existing setup that occurs within Asana: changes to fields/statuses/comments and if the task was completed.

Admitedly, we have several IT teams who are slowly transitioning from JIRA server to Asana. JIRA automatically sends email updates to bug submitters, which is why this feature is mentally anchored into our team’s list of ‘must haves.’

Alternative Solutions and why they haven’t satisfied:

  1. Google Sheet: This is the interim solution. We must provide all submitters with a link to our sheet and ensure the ‘view’ is filtered adaquately. With the correct filters in place, we have achieved a base line of adaquate visibility but there is a lack of professional presentation to the sheet due to limited customizability.

  2. Asana ‘read-only’ links. This view currently offers no filters or sorting to be baked in. Therefore it provides too much information and confuses users. We tried it and subsequently discontinued usage until proper filtering is available.

Thank you for listening!

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2

Hi,

There is another alternative: build a automation that looks for comment on such tasks, and sends the comment to the email address stored in a custom field. Did you consider this one?

Hope that helps.

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Hi @Bastien_Siebman,

This was indeed an option. However, given such a large userbase that spans many teams, the idea of supporting the solution is too risky. My company would not institute a solution unless it was built into Asana itself.

To clarify your solution: I assume you are suggesting the use of Zapier, Make, or any of the other similar solutions? (If Asana has the capability to do this already, please let me know as I would be happy to try it).

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@Daniel_Frome yes I am suggesting those, since Asana does not have this built-in (yet?).

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Good point. In addition the “task-level” update, we were looking at Project and Portfolio Status Update for “External” stakeholders.
This could simply be a PDF or something we can send to the various contract holders, customers, etc. (context: Asana used for customer project delivery, not internal IT projects and the such).

The status report feature as it exists right now it’s very easy to use, however only friendly to Asana users; but once we try to “Print” or export in any way that I am aware of, it looks
 well, I would not send to a customer.

Also, related to this, The overview view has neat information such as Project Roles (another pain point, but that’s another topic), a summary of Milestones and their status
 but those seem to either disappear (roles) or limited (milestones) to only a range of 1-4 weeks


Is there a way that I am not aware of to exploit this nice feature for external stakeholder updates? (same applies to portfolio updates).

Thanks!

Is there any way to create a

1 Like
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I see that Asana has rules for sending Gmail emails when a status is changed:

Screenshot 2023-12-08 at 10.40.04 AM
Screenshot 2023-12-08 at 10.40.04 AM2354×1326 269 KB

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I would like to be able to communicate with non-Asana users through a task. Our Sales team does not have Asana access, but they will submit items for Triaging by using an Asana form. Without giving access to the entire project by making it public, I would like to be able to communicate with them about the task they submitted directly in the task itself. This helps keep track of the communications in the task itself without extra work efforts. As a start, perhaps there could be an option to manually enter an email address and send them an update or request for information whereby if they replied using a link it would add the reply to the task.

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Hi @Kara_Durden welcome to the forum. Essentially it is a little difficult as if they are communicating or following in Asana they would need to have a licence. You could use an integration with Teams or Slack to send updates to a channel using rules/automations. Or you could look at 3rd party integrations that might be able to help here.

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Hi @Kara_Durden and @Danielle-GenD, it looks like we already have another thread with a similar request. I’m merging this topic to consolidate all votes. We are currently considering this possibility, and if it moves to development, we’ll update the main thread :slight_smile:

2 Likes