Automation to notify multiple items in 1 (one) action

Hi @hlopezvc, @alejencia, & @horton - Melissa here from the monday.com support team! Thank you for writing in about this need. I understand how this could be a useful update to the notification automations, and I have gone ahead and shared your request with our team :slight_smile: Please let us know if you have any questions in the meantime!

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@melissav-monday.com definitvely this is a must have feature!!! we need this

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Thank you @melissav-monday.com for looking into this.

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@melissav-monday.com hi,
there is any news in advance for this request?
we really need something like this for our workflow,

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I am wondering if this could be done with a general purpose monday app. When I read through the comments is that different people want different things. For instance:

@hlopezvc: “What i am proposing here is to have an automation that with some rules can report, notify, or do some more actions on multiple items or pulses.”

  • looks like due date is the trigger here

@alejencia: “in my case instructors. Ideal format of such summary is the daily highlights email because it includes deadlines / important dates.”

  • look like the trigger is daily

@horton: “We were hoping to notify people of new tasks, but did not want to send 10 notifications for 10 items that just got generated all at the same time.”

  • looks like the trigger is on new item creation

When we can agree on the exact needs I am willing to invest time to see if this can be build with a monday app. So, the questions are:

  • what needs to be the trigger
  • where do we get the users from (everybody assigned to item?)
  • do we want notification (in system) or email?

Hi @basdebruin, taking a look to all the avaliable standard triggers on Monday Apps, i think that reporting multiple items needs a trigger that not depends on one item due date or status value (in common sense). So i think that could be a scheduled or recurring trigger.

every time period (trigger) report ALL items (action)
every time period (trigger) report ALL items (action) with THIS status (modifier)
every time period (trigger) report ALL items (action) with THIS text/number value (modifier)
every time period (trigger) report ALL items (action) with THIS DueDate passed.
every time period (trigger) report ALL items (action) in THIS GROUP (another useful modifier)

i think most effective notification is a combination in system/email because the result of this action would be a list of all items (item names and desired columns similar to excel reports), if this could be done of course.

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Hi @hlopezvc,

Looks like this can be done, although quite a bit of work. What needs to be clear is:

  • ALL items (in a specific board/group? in the current board? where the user is assigned to?)
  • notification/email: can we rely on the email send when the notification is issued? This is a setting every user can change in their profile

Hi bas,
this could be modifiers, and could be quite useful too for many use cases.

all items in a board - standar
all items in THIS group - modifier
all items where a user is assigned to - modifier

about notifications, I think it is necessary to send the email in a forced way, because the results (example in a board with many items) will not be correctly viewed from the notifications área.

Hi Hernan

I will have a look after I update my existing apps, probably early September

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Hi basdebruin, I’d like to add my vote and use case for being able send summary notifications from monday.com boards rather than an email per task. Thanks in advance for reading and thinking about my suggestion.

I’m a project manager for software implementations with external customers. At the beginning of each project we invite our external (and internal) customers to share our project board. Invariably, within a few days they stop using their board because they are overwhelmed by the amount of email they receive every time a task is updated. They also generally feel that they are too busy to log into their board.

If they ignore or filter out their email because it is overwhelming and don’t log into their boards, it’s easy to see how the boards quickly become useless. Honestly, most of my customers simply refuse to use monday.com because of how noisy it is.

Personally, I’d like to go a step further. While it would be great to have a daily summary email, I’d prefer to have the option of sending the summary email to each task owner, and at the cadence of my choice.

For example, for a project with an accelerated timeline it may be appropriate to send email to the team every day.
For a project with a more relaxed timeline a weekly update would be sufficient.
And I’d really like to see the option to set a different cadence for each team member. In most projects there are certain people who need to make or receive updates daily (such as the IT staff while testing data integrations) and others who are working on longer term goals and don’t need to receive updates as often (such as people writing marketing content that will all be due on a certain day).

Thanks!

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Hi @melissav-monday.com @basdebruin everyone…

We still need this solution, and im a constant reader of this forum, blog, videos, emails, apps and everything from monday, and i dont see actually a way (via monday or via app) to achieve this.

How could be i cannot replicate what Monday does with the “daily highlights” but in a custom way? selecting board / group / conditions (just like filters 2.0) to set up my custom resume notifications?

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I also would like to get this bumped up. We have had multiple instances where I just need to remind my team of outstanding work or work that is almost due and not marked as “Done”. However, as Monday is currently built, they’d be getting many notifications per item whereas if I could set up one notification for all items marked as “In Progress” for instance that would be much more efficient.

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Hi @melissav-monday.com is there any update on this feature? It would really help in my organization!
Thanks!

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We are also very interested in this. In a number of our “onboarding boards”, we use templates that include a ton of subitems.

When an item is created using the template, all subitems except the first (which is tagged as Ready) are tagged with a status of Wait. When that first subitem changes to Done, an automation kicks in to change the status of Dependent items from Wait to Ready. Then a notification automation kicks in and notifies “people” when the status changes to Ready.

The problem is that the first automation might switch 15 or more subitem tasks for a single person to ready, resulting in 15 notifications to that person (which is enough noise that people turn off notifications or ignore them).

I can see that this might be a tough nut to crack but I have a couple of ideas on how to approach it:
Add “notification groups” to the “items selected” pane… This thing:

Couple that with an automation that would look like this:
When subitem status changes to ready and subitem is part of a notification group, prepare subitem summary for all tasks in the notification group that are also ready then send summary notification to person.

Or perhaps better(?), leverage a second status column with a related automation?
When subitem status changes to “ready” and subitem “other status” is “notification group” then prepare subitem summary for all tasks that tick both boxes then send summary notification to person.

I imagine there would have to be some sort of time delay in any of these automations (which would be handy in other situations) to make sure the earlier automations have time to complete but even if the delay was 15 minutes it would still be better than getting 15 notifications!

There are almost certainly a vast number of more elegant ways to solve this but I thought I’d share in the spirit of “reporting a problem along with a proposed solution”.

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I want to follow up on this feature. are there any updates about this? It would be a great feature to have and we would definitely use it!

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I agree, it’s too messy to work with too many different notifications rows related other then few bulk ones to have a short summary once a day…
In case a customer is involved as guest member we annoy her/him with so many triggered notifications

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I would also like to be able to use a feature like this.

We have a board that tracks due dates for an external course designer. We work with the designer to set their own due dates for each step in the course design process. The designer often chooses to complete multiple steps (items) on the same date.

When I set up an automation to remind them of their upcoming due date, they get multiple emails at virtually the same time. I would love to be able to automate an email reminder that consolidates ALL the items due on the same day into ONE email.

Thank you,
Phoebe

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Any news here? We would also need this feature.

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Hi @melissav-monday.com ,

Please can you provide an update on this?

I am a new Monday user and this is also a critical issue for us. We send reminders to each user about tasks that still have the status of “open” on a Monday morning - however, it is painful for them to receive 20/30/40 emails every Monday morning, when instead we could have one nice email that lists out all the tasks.

I know there will be different use cases for everyone, but let’s start small and expand on the feature once it’s rolled out. I see the two “basic” use cases as:

  1. When “day” arrives, notify “person” of ALL items with “status” of in the current board
    (Person is the Monday.com user that is assigned to the item)

  2. When “follow-up date” arrives, notify person of ALL items with “status” of that have the same follow-up day. E.g. Monday.com would have to cycle through all items checking if the follow-up day was today, and then attach all items in an email

Please let me know your thoughts,

Rob

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Hi!

I see this conversation started back in 2020. Has there been any updates or solutions to have this feature?

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