The Start Somebody Else in a Flow action allows you to place a separate contact or group in a flow when a contact reaches this step. But what if you want to start contacts who are the result of a search? We’ve added this new feature to allow you to easily start contacts who fit your query in another flow.
In the example flow below, we’ve asked a school guidance counselor to send the first three letters of a student group’s school ID. We also asked them to send a message we’ll forward to those students in a child flow. We then started contacts who fit the query school_id = @results.school_id in the flow ‘Register SID’. Only the students who match the ID sent by the counselor will be started in the child flow. The child flow will ultimately reference the message collected in the parent flow using @parent.results.alert
Parent Flow
Building the Parent Flow
After asking the counselor for the school ID of the students, we’ll collect that information using a ‘Wait for Response’ and save that to a new contact field named ‘Student ID’ to be referenced using @results.school_id:
Next, we’ll ask for the counselor to send a message that we’ll forward to the students. All of the text the counselor sends will be saved using another ‘Wait for Response’ naming the result ‘Alert’, which is referenced using @results.alert :
Once we’ve collected all the data we need from the counselor, we’ll start the students in a child flow called ‘Register SID’:
To set up this step, first choose the ‘Start Somebody Else in a Flow’ action from the dropdown menu when creating a new node. Next, select the option ‘Select recipients from a query’:
Recall that in our example, we’re using a contact field from a flow result called ‘School ID’. So, we’ll use school_id = @results.school_id. Last, choose the flow in which you want to start the recipients. All students who match the query will be started in the flow ‘Register SID’.
Be sure to separate words with underscores rather than spaces.
Child Flow
Our final step is to forward the text of the message collected in the parent flow’s ‘Wait for Response’ result named ‘Alert’ using @parent.results.alert within the child flow:
By referencing that result from the parent flow, the student should receive the full text of the message sent by the counselor:
That’s it! Be sure to check out our article on using Start Somebody Else in a Flow which shows an example of using the ‘create a new contact’ option, which generates an empty contact in the flow you choose to start.