Autoresponder for filling out profile

Question

I have a volunteer profile set up and it's working just fine. I need to send an email response with additional info to users who sign up.

I can't find any info on how to do this. Any help appreciated.

Thank you!

PS: Running Joomla 3.4 and the latest version of Civi Edit: The profile in question was created by >>> Administer>>> Customize Data and Screens >>> Profile. It's run as a mailing list and stand-alone form on the site.

I did not use CiviVolunteer Extension although I do have it installed.

Answer 1

I've managed to solve problems like this by generating custom activities, and then creating scheduled reminders which trigger on these activities. This is better than using sendmail directly, because the email more easily managed from the front end. For more information on automated reminders, see the docs.

For generating activities on forms submits, you could use hook_civicrm_postProcess to trap the form submit. For generating activities on new contact creation, you could use hook_civicrm_post. For more information on hooks, see the docs.

From within the hooks, you can create new activities like so:

civicrm_api3('Activity', 'create', array(
    'source_contact_id' => $id,
    'activity_type_id' => $activity_type_id,
    'subject' => "Participant $id Status Changed to $pstatus",
    'status_id' => 2,
    'assignee_id' => $member_org_poc_id,
    'details' => "Participant #{$id} Status Changed to $pstatus",
));

Answer 2

1. You can add all the users who sign up via the profile to a group

2. periodically you can send an email to all the members of the group who have not yet recd the mailing. This is fairly easy to accomplish early on, by excluding all the recipients of previous mailings

3. This method does not scale beyond a few weeks. You'll need to keep track of the last mailing sent and send new mailings to new folks only. I cant think of an easy method off hand. This blog post might be helpful

https://civicrm.org/blogs/dahndy/drip-campaigns-drip-marketing-welcome-series