INTEGRATION OPTIONS

ADVANCED

for Little Green Light

Hunter Williams

CONTENTS

INPUT VIA WEBHOOKS

05

OUTPUT TO PERMALINKS

18

BONUS: API

23

This guide covers two advanced methods for integrating third-party software services with Little Green Light. The first approach lets you write data to Little Green Light, and thesecond approach lets you get data out of Little Green Light, so this is our “advanced I/O guide” (input and output).

Level of difficulty: Advanced You don’t need to be a true computer programmer to use the advanced integration options described in this guide, but you do need to be comfortable working with code (or at least pseudo code).

Here are the 3 approaches we'll discuss in this guide:

Input via webhooks: Little Green Light’s new custom integrations “listen” for data sent via webhooks

Output via scheduled reports to a permalink: Scheduled reports can write to a permalink (web location), which another application can use as a data table

API: Not yet released for general use, LGL has created an API and it’s available for beta users. This section provides a case study and describes how to participate in a beta

Advanced Integration Options for Little Green Light

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I N P U T V I A W E B H O O K S

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The steps involved:

How to connect to Little Green Light via a webhook

Find a software service that can push data via webhooks Set up a custom integration in LGL Copy the “listener” URL into the software service Test the integration

Step 1. Find a software service that can push data via webhooks

A large and growing number of software services offer webhooks. To find out if a software service offers webhooks, try searching for the name of the software and webhooks, such as a search for “Facebook webhooks”. The first result for this search is:

Be aware that not all webhooks are created equal. Some may simply send a confirmation message that an action occurred but not pass through other useful detail. Others expect you to use a combination of webhooks and an API to be able to pull in information.

Some examples of software offering webhooks of one kind or another include: - Facebook - Google Drive (and Forms and Sheets) - Eventbrite - Campaign Monitor - Stripe - Gravity Forms - Zapier

Zapier is an easy place to start, because they have already done a lot of the work involved in connecting services. They make it easy to find which services offer hooks for sending and receiving data. While Little Green Light is not yet listed as a pre-integrated service, you can choose a listed service to trigger sending data via webhooks and then connect that through a custom “Zap” (also known as a "connection") to Little Green Light.

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Once you find a service that can send a webhook, you need to set up a “listener” in your Little Green Light account. You do that in Settings > Integration Settings by clicking on the "Custom integrations" link and then the “+ Add new integration” button..

Then provide a name for your integration and the list of fields you’ll be integrating from the other software.

Step 2. Set up a custom integration in LGL

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Upon saving, Little Green Light will show you the new integration and the URL for its listener.

From this area, you can:

Edit the name of your integration and the fields it is integratingUpdate the mapping of where each field should be going in your LGL account

Step 2. Set up a custom integration in LGL (cont.)

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Step 3: Copy the “listener” URL into the software service

Now that we have our listener set up in Little Green Light, we need to return to the other software service and tell it where to send the webhook-driven data.

The exact way you set this up in the other software will vary from one service to another. You may need to obtain developer credentials.

The one thing you’ll have to do for sure is paste the URL for your LGL listener into the software service that’s sending the data. Your URL will look something like the following (note the word "listener" at the end of the URL).

https://prefix.littlegreenlight.com/integrations /d34079f9-24b1-431e-beca-89a68c080673/listener

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How do the various sets of data fields all connect?

The custom integration lets you map data from one set of fields (from the source application) into your Little Green Light fields. The illustration below shows how the custom integration listens for data fields, and then pushes them into the appropriate fields in Little Green Light.

When you set up your custom integration, you’re taking care of steps B and C in the diagram below. In step B, you are setting up your listener and identifying the exact field names it will receive from the other software. In step C, you are mapping those fields into your Little Green Light account.

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Step 4: Test the integration

Now it’s time to test the integration and see what happens. How you test will vary depending on the software you’ve integrated. On the Little Green Light side, the place to look for results is your Integration Queue. If the webhook has sent data successfully, you’ll see new records waiting for review in your Integration Queue (unless during the integration mapping you check the “Do not require review” box).

The Integration Queue in Little Green Light

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End-to-end example: Twitter mention integrated via Zapier

Here’s an illustrated example of a custom integration, step by step.

What we want this integration to do: Any time our organization (in our example, the organization is Little Green Light) is referenced in a Twitter post (using our Twitter handle “@littlegrnlight”), we’d like to pull that post into our LGL account as a note on the constituent record of the person who made the post.

In this process, we cover steps A through D in this diagram:

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End-to-end example: Twitter mention integrated via Zapier (cont.)

Set up integration in Zapier (steps A and B)

We set up an account on Zapier (free for limited use), and then searched through the software providers to find one we wanted to integrate to our LGL account. We selected Twitter. In Zapier, there are pre-defined options for which trigger you want to use.

From there, we set up a link to our Twitter account, and then set which terms should act as a trigger for this Zap (as each integration is called).

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End-to-end example: Twitter mention integrated via Zapier (cont.)

Now we’re ready to set the destination for this integration. Zapier has many pre-defined services as possible destinations, but to integrate to Little Green Light we set up a custom webhook integration.

We chose the Post option, and at this point Zapier asks for the destination URL:

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End-to-end example: Twitter mention integrated via Zapier (cont.)

To come up with the URL, we go to our LGL account and add a new integration:

We pasted in the destination URL and defined the fields that should be sent from Twitter to Little Green Light.

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End-to-end example: Twitter mention integrated via Zapier (cont.)

Complete custom integration in Little Green Light (steps C and D)

Returning to our custom integration in Little Green Light, we define the fields that we’re expecting to receive from theexternal software (Twitter fields coming in via Zapier, in this case).

And we finish by mapping the fields into our LGL account.

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End-to-end example: Twitter mention integrated via Zapier (cont.)

With these steps completed, we should see a successful test from Zapier (they automatically sent a test using an existing Twitter message).

And sure enough, in our Integration Queue, we see this Twitter mention has been brought in successfully.

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O U T P U T T O P E R M A L I N K S

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Your Little Green Light account has lots of great data in it, but how can you make use of that data in another software application? One method is to export data to a spreadsheet and import that to your other software. But, using scheduled reports and the permalink publishing option, you can make this happen automatically. Files written to the permalink location can then be used by a third-party software application.

The pieces to the puzzle are:

Output via scheduled reports to permalinks

A. Generating a scheduled report in LGL, and publishing to a permalink B. Using the data in a separate software service

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A. Generating a scheduled report in Little Green Light

In Little Green Light, you can schedule reports to run automatically every day, every weekday, every Monday, or the first of every month. And on scheduled reports you can choose to copy the resulting file to a permalink location (a cloud-based file location).

After running your report, you’ll see the location of the permanent link in the "Scheduled reports" area.

The permanent link provides a fixed URL where the data from this report will be stored as a data file. When your report updates every weekday, week, or month, you can pull in that new data very easily, and the location of the data (the permanent link URL) will stay the same. The great thing about this is that you can use another application to point to that data source, and it will automatically update with the new data.

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B. Using the data in a separate software service

There are a number of online software services that can pull data from a cloud-based location, such as an LGL permalink, including Excel and Google Sheets.

For example, you can create a Google Sheet to pull in data from an LGL report, and then use Google Sheets to perform calculations, create a chart, or run other manipulations on the data.

In Google Sheets, the formula to pull data from another location will look like this: =importdata("https://demo3.littlegreenlight.com/rptlink /d0e961d9-7339-4c71-8468-254a6c3f1f0c")

The URL in this formula is the location of the permanent link for your LGL report.

In a Google Sheet, you can place this formula at the top left corner of where you want the report data to flow in. In this example, we’ve put the formula in cell B1, and after hitting the Enter key, the Google Sheet goes out to the permanent link location and pulls in the data.

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B. Using the data in a separate software service (cont.)

When you open the spreadsheet the next time, you can force the Google Sheet to re-pull the data by putting your cursor in cell B1 and clicking Enter.

Now that we have our data in a Google Sheet, we can take advantage of some of Google’s capabilities. Here are a few examples of what you could do:

Create a heatmap showing a distribution of donors by state:

Or, create your own dashboards:

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B O N U S : A P I

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The Little Green Light API allows third-party software to query, read, and write data to an LGL account. The API is in the early stages of release. At this point it’s still a by-invitation type option, but if you are interested in pursuing a possible API integration with LGL, we’d love to hear from you.

Please provide the following pieces of information and email us at support@littlegreenlight.com.

Bonus: API

1. What service would you connect to LGL via an API (i.e., name of your software) 2. Do you have a developer who can do the coding on your side to hook up an API? 3. Which fields do you want to be able to read from LGL? 4. Which fields do you want to be able to write to LGL?

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LANDSCAPE is software used by land trusts and other conservation groups to manage land acquisition and stewardship. The developer of LANDSCAPE used the Little Green Light API to integrate the two services, so that contact information updated in one system could be automatically reflected in the other.

The key to this integration is that each contact to be synced from LANDSCAPE needs a one-to-one relationship to a constituent record in Little Green Light. Once the two records are linked via unique identifiers, keeping them in sync is pretty simple. To setup the initial relationship requires a lookup and then a confirmation by the user that the correct record has been found (or that a new record should be created).

API Example