Civirules: how to move contact into NEW group XX days after added to group

Question

I want to automatically move Contacts from my "New Organizer" group to my "Active" group 90 days after the Contact is ADDED to the "New organizer" group.

I have created a pipeline to track the stages of my volunteer's involvement. I am triggering movement into each stage by manually setting an Activity Type and a Unique Activity Status for each stage of my pipeline. I'm then added people to groups based on their Activity Status using Civirules. This works great.

But I also want to set rules that automatically move new and inactive volunteers into new groups.

I can almost see the way there using Civirules, but don't see the option to do a Field Value Comparison on Date Added to Group (or Activity Created Date, which could be another option for me)

OPTION 1

LINKED TRIGGER: Daily trigger for group members

FIELD VALUE COMPARISON: I can only select from Contact or GroupContact fields, so I can't proceed.

OPTION 2

LINKED TRIGGER: Activity Date reached ; Activity with type XX AND Status XX

LINKED CONDITION: Field Value Comparison; Activity Created Date = +90 days

LINKED ACTIONS: Remove Contact from initial Group; add Contact to new Group

Is this going to work as I expect? Will the Civirule be activated without an explicit trigger to do the date comparison 90 days after the Activity Created Date?

Answer 1

A rule can't be created without indicating an explicit trigger - there is a cron job for CiviRules whose description reads: trigger civirules cron triggers.

A few things about your condition:

1. If you are not 100% sure that the created date will always equal the activity date, you're probably better off using the activity date instead since this is user-driven whereas created date is system-driven
2. Using an operator of "Greater than or equal to" will allow you to capture any retroactively created/updated activities (another argument for using the activity date instead of the created date)
3. "Compare Value" assumes system date, so it actually needs to be negative to compare the previous 90 days (when you save the condition, you will see the date 90 days ago listed as follows: Activity.activity_date_time >= YYYY-MM-DD).

If you find that the activity based rule is not working out for you, you may wish to consider the development of custom triggers, conditions and actions as documented HERE.

Hope this helps, Tamar