Automations: Google Calendar

Contents

Pre-requisites for using Google Calendar Automations

1. Google Workspace Integration with all required scopes

To use Google Calendar Actions in Automations, you need to have connected your Google Workspace account, including granting the following scopes:

  • calendar.readonly: allows you to choose which calendar to use in your automations
  • calendar.events: allows Dado to edit the attendee list of events
  • calendar: allows Dado to create new calendar events

To check if you already have granted these scopes: Go to Organisation, then select Integrations in the left-hand navigation. Click on the Google Workspace tile. In the modal that appears, look under the list of scopes:

To add these scopes: ask the Google Workspace integrator (the Dado user who set up your Google Workspace integration) to log into Dado, remove the Workspace integration, and immediately re-add it.
Re-adding the integration immediately is important, to prevent any gaps in Dado's connection to Google. During these gaps, Dado will not be able to write or read from Google Sheets, or run Automations that interact with Google Workspace.

For more information on this integration, see the Google Workplace Integration article.

2. Google Workspace integrator with access to the right calendars

Your "Google Workspace integrator" is the Dado user who set up your Google Workspace integration. This will often be a special Dado user account made just for the sake of this integration. 
Dado uses the Google Workspace account connected to this user to create calendar events and invite people to events. In order to do these, that Google Workspace account needs to have access to the calendars containing those events.

To ensure this Google Workspace account has access to the right Google Calendars:

  1. Confirm the email address for your Google Workspace integrator.
    • You can find out which is your Google Workspace integrator account by checking the Integrations page.
    • Go to Organisation, then select Integrations in the left-hand navigation.
    • Click on the Google Workspace tile. The integrator account will be listed in the modal, under 'email'

  2. Follow Google's instructions to share any relevant calendars with this email address, granting it "make changes and manage sharing" permissions.
  3. Log in to the Google Mail inbox for this email address and find the calendar invitation emails. Open each email and click the link to accept the invitation
    • You may need to request your IT Team does this final step, if they are the people who set up this Google Workspace account and you do not know the account's password.

'Invite to event' Action 

The "Invite to Event" Action is useful for automatically adding participants or managers to existing events such as Onboarding Sessions or Company All-Hands.

Remember: you can use Target Audiences to add different types of Participants to different events. For instance, you could add people to different in-person onboarding events based on their office location.

After dragging the Action to the main area, fill in the following information to activate:

  • Who should be invited: You can choose any of the usual actors that can be assigned tasks, e.g. Participant (Personal Email), Participant (Work Email), Manager, etc. It's possible to add multiple people.
  • Additional people to invite: Select other individuals (who are not the Participant or Supporting Actors) to invite to this meeting every time the automation runs. This could be, for instance, the person leading an onboarding session.
  • Look for event with name: You can search a specific calendar for the event you want to add people to. It works with partial matches, so you can enter for example "All-Hands" will match both  "Company All-Hands" and "Team All-Hands".
  • In Calendar: The calendar in which you want to look for the event. This shows the calendar available to the Google account used for setting up the integration. We suggest setting up a specific calendar just for these events so they won't be in your personal Calendar.
  • Find the first event: When should the automation look for the event. You have 3 options here:
    • After first day at work / last day at work / participant birthday: This setting tells the automation to look for events relative to the date of whichever milestone is relevant for this Experience. For instance, if this is an onboarding experience you can use this to find events relative to the employee's first day at work.
    • After experience start: the automation will look for events relative to the day the Participant started this Experience. This is useful for Experiences which aren't anchored to a key employee date (like a first or last day at work). For instance: use this to invite Participants to workshops as part of a training Experience.
    • After the automation runs:  the automation will start looking for events at the time it's run, which is determined by the "Date" selected in the main settings of the automation.
  • Skip the first X Days: Allows you to skip events that are in the first X days or weeks after the automation runs. This is useful, for example, if you want the automation to run on an employee's first day (so they receive the invitation immediately) but want them to join a certain event during their second week. 

Once you've set up all options, a sample list of events found by the automation will be shown. Use this to check whether the automation is finding the correct events.

Once everything is set up, simply save and you're done! Now every time a participant goes through the experience, the automation will look for the right event and invite them to it. They will receive an invitation email directly from Google Calendar.

Troubleshooting

The calendar I want doesn't appear in the calendar dropdown

This is due to the Google Workspace integrator account not having access to this calendar. Set up this access following the instructions above.

No sample events appear for the event name I've selected

This is usually caused by a mismatch between the name you've specified in the automation, and the name of these events in your calendar. Double-check that you've typed the name of the event into Dado exactly as it appears in the calendar. For maximum accuracy, copy the name from Google Calendar and paste it into Dado.

It's also possible that the event you're looking for is actually set up in a different calendar to the one you've selected in Dado's calendar dropdown. Double-check that the events are set up in this calendar, and change your selection if necessary.

No one was invited to this event by this automation

There are several possible causes for this issue:

  1. The name you've specified in Dado does not exactly match the name of the event in your calendar; or the event is in a different calendar to the one you've specified in Dado
    • You can check this by seeing whether Dado shows any events under the "sample events" heading. If no events appear here, this is the cause of your issue.
    • To resolve this, check that the calendar specified in the Dado dropdown is indeed the calendar containing this event; and that you've entered the event name in Dado exactly as it appears in the calendar.
  2. Your target audiences are not set up correctly
    • You might have set up the rules for the target audience so they don't match the Participants you intended; or you could have not assigned the relevant action block to that target audience.
  3. The skip logic you've set up caused Participants to be invited to an event on the wrong date
    • Check the timing of events versus when in your experience this event triggers.
    • We strongly recommend setting automations to find events relative to experience anchors (like first day at work) to avoid this issue.

The wrong people were invited to an event by this automation

This could be due to one of two reasons:

  1. You did not specify the right people in "Who should be invited"
  2. Your target audiences are not set up correctly
    • You might have set up the rules for the target audience so they don't match the Participants you intended; or you could have assigned the relevant action block to the wrong target audience.

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