Advanced Nomination System with Communications to Both Nominators and Nominees

[Anonymous]

We require quite a complicated flow for an event that's coming up early next year.  Our existing flow is as follows (and I warn you that this is a bit of a nightmare already):

1. A contact is nominated by one of our employees - one form submission = one nominee.  Currently, the nominee is the commanding contact record, with the nominator as a custom field attached to that contact.
2. The nominee receives an email requesting their confirmation of attendance at the event.
3. The nominee confirms or declines, changing his/her status in the program.
4. The program is exported with the nominator field.  We manually replace the "Nominator" column headers with "First Name," "Last Name," etc. and import the list of nominators into the system as new contacts.
5. Nominators are sent an email requesting their confirmation of attendance at the event.
6. Nominators confirm or decline, changing their statuses in the system.

For this next event, we want to automate the process even further.

1. An employee nominates one contact (or more) to attend the event.
2. Upon submission of the nomination form, the NOMINATOR receives a confirmation email saying, "Thanks for nominating person A, person B, etc." (using tags to list one or more nominees) and mentions that we will be sending an email to the nominees shortly.
3. Nomination list is sent to internal stakeholders for approval of each contact.  When approved, each nominee's program status changes to "Approved," triggering an email to the NOMINATOR saying that the nominee has been approved.
4. Each approved nominee receives an email requesting confirmation of attendance at the event.  If confirmed, status is changed in the program to "Confirmed."
5. Each nominator receives an email saying that the confirmation email has been sent to each of his/her nominees.
6. Each nominator receives an email when the nominee status is changed to "Confirmed."

I warned you it was messy.  🙂

Have any of you tried something like this in the past, or do you have any suggestions as to how this should be implemented?  Not even remotely sure how to start this without doing a ridiculous amount of manual export/scrub/import work.

Thanks in advance!

[Anonymous]

Note:  This answer will require some api experience and some simple scripting

Employee nominates contact via form in a landing page without marketo tracking 
(Comes in as new lead / update with employee information in custom fields)

Nominee status changed to NOMINATED

Send confirmation email to Employee 

Send approval email to Supervisor

Supervisor clicks Approve or Disapprove link in email
(These links go to a Survey which prefills with data about the Nominee from url parameters in the link that are passed through via marketo tokens)
(Survey could be Survey Gizmo *paid or Google Forms etc.)

Supervisor Submits the Survey

You need to program the survey to then execute an api call to change a custom data value for the nominee 
This is relatively simple if you know the api and javascript with either of the two survey solutions i mentioned
The data value change will trigger a Smart Campaign to change the nominee's program status APPROVED or DISAPPROVED based on the value
For Reference  https://community.marketo.com/MarketoDiscussionDetail?id=90650000000PhOrAAK

The change in status will trigger:

Email to Employee with status update

If APPROVED Email to Nominee for Confirmation

Email to Nominee for Confirmation will include a link to a landing page with the confirmation form - Yes or No

The form submission will trigger the next program status change
CONFIRMED or DENIED

This will trigger a confirmation email to the Nominee
and another status update to the Nominator


A few more emails than in your example but no manual import / exports
I hope you find this helpful!


 

[Anonymous]

This is fantastic - thank you, Josh!