I work in the marketing department for a small non-profit. The marketing department often receives requests from other departments in our organization. We would like to use Asana to help us manage those tasks. Is there a way for us to do that besides manually adding them to Asana? Only our department is using Asana at this point; the rest of the organization is not.
Hey @Advocate,
You can create an email filter at your client, forward that messages to Asana and let Asana email bridge to create the tasks. Link below.
There are many ways to do that. For example:
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you can create a mailing list that forwards the email to you and an email filter forwards these emails to asana (you will be the user that created the task)
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you can create a filter on the email subject (i.e [Request] A new request) and forward these emails to asana
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you can create a new bot user in asana for example (requests@marketing.acme.com) and forward the emails of this user to Asana. With this way, you will able to receive inbox notifications.
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you can use Zapier.
Why donāt you try to bring all the organization in Asana? I know itās really hard and needs time to onboard, but you will be rewarded at the end.
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@Advocate if this were me, Iād ask the people send the requests to send them directly to the Asana specific project email address. Each project comes with a unique email, so they can send them to this address and they automatically get added to the project. You can learn more about this feature here: Turning emails into Asana tasks | Product guide ā¢ Asana Product Guide
Please let me know if you have any more questions. If youāre interested in improving your use of Asana further or want to discuss team training, please feel free to book a free 30-minute introductory call with me to discuss consulting options.
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Hey @paulminors,
I think that that the email will be dropped from asana if the sender is not an Asana user with access in the specific team/project/organization.
Ps. Keep up the good work with the productivity posts and videos. I like them 
@Diakoptis I would look into any number of forms generators that allow a PDF completed form to be sent to a project email address with you as the submitter but all information in the formā¦ Then I would set up a project for submitted requests, use the project ID in forms manager forward, Then set up an In-process Project to change the Requests. Make necessay assignments and maintain until completedā¦ I set this up as an IT ticketing system recently. Here is Asana documentation on how to impliment google forms just submitted by @Sara Web Forms & Asana ā¢ Asana Product Guide
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Correct, the project specific emails only work if theyāre a member of the project or team that the project belongs to!
@Advocate, I would advise setting up a catch all email like marketing@yourorg where people send requests there, and you set up the auto forwarding like @Diakoptis recommended - sending them to a catch-all requests project that you or whomever have task creation notifications on for.
The only issue with this method is that thereās no back and forth via email the way there would be if you added them to the org, if you needed answers from them you would have to email or slack them etc. I believe there are solutions out there (3rd party), similar to Customer Support functions - where people use Asana for CS purposes. However if youāre looking to not add a 3rd party for reasons, then the forwarding would be the way to go IMO! =)
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@Caisha About this.
I believe there are solutions out there (3rd party), similar to Customer Support functions - where people use Asana for CS purposes. However if youāre looking to not add a 3rd party for reasons, then the forwarding would be the way to go IMO! =)
Do you know what 3rd parties? Iām really struggling to find a way to communicate about tasks with our external clients easily. yes we could jump on email but then there is no linkage to tasks, no way for others to review the thread. Its a major drawback in Asana, and so I am looking for 3rd party systems that can do it but failing. the Gmail Add-on, or Zapier, or IFTTT or Dossier, all are quite basic and do not provide a streamlined way to easily communicate with external clients on tasks.
Thanks
Iām really struggling to do something that should be so simple.
We have development projects so have a team and customers in the project. Asana is good for that.
But we also provide support to all our customers on various things. Some are are free some a charged. MOST customers are not in an asana project. Their support requests are too small to warrant an asana account for them just for that.
Asana has the problem that it doesnāt allow just anyone to email into tasks. So we use a Helpdesk for email requests.
Our problem now is we have two systems to manage tasks. When youāre in one of them you donāt see the other so miss tasks and deadlines.
Whatās needed is one system for all tasks no matter who or where they cane from. Then we can see all our workload and prioritise and organise.
We canāt forward emails from customers as tasks instead of the Helpdesk because itās not āfromā the customer so comments communication wonāt work. So you have to communicate outside of Asana (Helpdesk).
Copying the task from the Helpdesk to Asana is just extra time and itās in two places and open to mistakes. Two places to close a task. Two places that store data and assets.
Basically using two systems to manage tasks is ridiculous and makes us disorganised.
So how do others deal with requests from non-Asana users but ensuring their tasks are still in the main task system (asana) to have a proper overview of all tasks?
Thanks
Hi @Laurence_Cope and thanks for sharing your feedback with us! Your question is very similar to Using Asana to field external requests - #2 by Diakoptis so Iāve gone ahead and merged it with this main thread; hopefully you will find these workaround useful
Oh, so thats quite an old thread, are people going to see this?
Going to keep bumping it up, as I my original ticket was asking others for tips how they manage it, I am really struggling at the moment due to the lack of Asana features for this, and its extremely important to get this resolved.
Iāll update to what I am doing nowā¦
So due to not being able to have customers email into Asana, we have to use a Helpdesk system. I have to use Zapier to create an Asana task when a new ticket is received. This goes into our āSupportā project. We can then monitor the support project for external requests, then prioritise the task etc as per Asana tasks, and link back to the Helpdesk for communication.
But there are big drawbacks, I just cant see how to overcome themā¦
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Helpdesk costs us more than Asana! (I could use a shared Gmail account but its not good for assigning communications to staff and having notifications to that person when the customer replies)
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Its a separate system, we have to āCloseā the communications as well as the Asana tasks
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The Zapier Zap does not pass the email body for some reason! So we cant show a task description, and have to link back to the Helpdesk
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Zapier zaps every 15 minutes, so we lost up to 15 minutes of response time.
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We lose even more, because we are not getting notifications of new tasks created in Asana, when added via Zapier, even though I have enabled new ticket notification for all staff - I contacted Asana some time ago to ask about this but alas, no reply
So how else do other people overcome Asanaās block on external emails? Its hindering work as opposed to helping to honest!
Thanks
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Does anyone have any thoughts please? Weāre still struggling with multiple systems because Asana wont allow all our non-Asana customers to email us into our Asana support project. Thanks.
@advocate DID you ever get resolution to this? I have the exist same issue. Thx.
Wondering if you made progress @Laurence_Cope or @ethan_andelman
No, no progress, nor from Asana I dont think. I donāt understand why Asana are so narrow minded about this, and cant see the benefits of opening it up to allow non-members to email into my projects so I can then reply to them via comments. I have been struggling for ages. I use two systems now, Asana and Email. I get a lot of email so am stuck in my email system and never use Asana until my email inbox is empty, buy it keeps coming. Email keeps you away from your tasks and productivity.
If only all my email could go into Asana and I use comments to reply, then I only need one system, Asana, and I would upgrade and be more productive due to having all my tasks in one place. but until then I find it hard to break away from email and into Asana.
I am still with Asana only because other task management systems do the same thing.
Hello @Laurence_Cope I guess itās 2 years late but, in case it may help you and others who are willing to pay for the correct app, I guesss Wrike is the better for workflows, external requests and task management. Check it out, External Request Forms ā Wrike Help Center)%20can%20submit.&text=Users%20within%20your%20account%20can,it%20out%20and%20submit%20it.
Is there any new guidance on this issue/resolution? Iām new to Asana and this subject has come up.
Did you look at just setting up a form to funnel requests into your Asana and having all requestors, internal or external use that?
Weāre having exactly the same issue. Weāre only a small organisation but we have a Premium plan and it seems like weāre having to jump through a lot of hoops.
Weāre trying to use a form to create support tickets in a Help Desk project on Asana. This only creates an unassigned ticket in the project because assigning a default user is a āBusinessā feature.
We are then using a rule on the project to say that if a priority is set (Low/Medium/High - required field on the original form) then it emails our helpdesk@ shared email account. We have also created a pseudo user for the āHelp Deskā email and we initially assign the ticket to this account, so all subsequent comments/updates go through that, however, the original request is never actually sent to that email account AND the original sender also doesnāt receive any updates.
Seems so bizarre to me. Am I missing something obvious here?
Not sure if this will help you but we created an ASANA form and have used that for intake and rerouting!