How can I share Trello automations with my team?
Keep everyone on the same page with shared Trello automations! Learn how easy it is to improve collaboration and consistency with Trello automation libraries.
Trello is a highly customizable workspace, and automation is a key to creating a smooth, efficient workflow. By automating repetitive tasks, your team can take a hands-off approach, freeing up time for deeper, more strategic work. While setting up your automations may take a bit of time, the long-term benefits are invaluable.
If you’ve already invested time in creating automations, you might be wondering how to share them with your team. This article covers why and how to share Trello automations (previously known as Butler rules) with your team, along with best practices for doing so.
Why share automations with your team?
Improve your productivity. By streamlining repetitive tasks, you can hit deadlines faster and free up your team to focus on more important work.
Be consistent. Shared rules standardize the way you work, making sure everyone follows same process and no steps are missed.
Minimize human error. Automations are accurate every time, so you can reduce errors associated with manual work.
It’s just quicker and easier! Only one person needs to do the high-level thinking about what to automate and how – everyone else can just follow along.
How to share Trello automations with your team
Trello automation works by executing actions on behalf of the user who set up the rules. But to make things easier and more standardized across your boards, you can add automations to a library and share them with other users in your Trello workspace. Here’s how:
1. Create a Trello automation library
To create a new automation library, all you need to do is add a tag to any existing automation. Tags allow you to categorize your automations so that they can be easily filtered and shared. You might want to group similar automations together, for example:
Weekly tasks. General board maintenance that needs to be done for everyone, like archiving, sorting or adding recurring cards.
Team-specific tasks. This could cover automations that only apply to a certain team (i.e. sales, support or finance) like assigning work in a round-robin, adding a checklist, or setting a due date once a card reaches a specific stage in your workflow.
2. Share a Trello automation library
To share a Trello automation library, turn on the ”Shared” toggle in the lower-right corner of your automation group.
Use the toggle to share Trello automation libraries with other users in your workspace
Team members in your workspace will then be able to import the commands to their own board.
To import a shared library into your automation list, select ’Import all automations from the Shared library’.
Find out more about working with Trello automation libraries, as well as Trello automation quotas and limits in the Atlassian help center.
💡 NOTE Automation library sharing is only available on Standard, Premium, and Enterprise workspace boards, and the toggle is removed on free workspace boards.
Tips for best practices when sharing Trello automations
Create an automation bot
Consider creating a separate user or bot account specifically for automations. This is useful for two reasons:
A bot account makes it easy to share automations – while still maintaining a clear distinction between automated actions and manual user actions within the workspace.
Consolidating your Trello automations into one bot account means that you don’t lose access to your automation library if the person who initially set them up leaves the team or organization.
Make the most of tags
Tags help you to organize your command libraries so that you can:
Group rules and commands to share with your team.
Categorize automations, so that you can easily find them by filtering.
Enable or disable groups of automations on the current board, without having to go through each one individually.
Discover the power of email automation
With Email for Trello Power-Up, you can also get the benefit of Trello automation for email! It’s perfect for sending templated emails that need to go out at a certain stage in your workflow.
Here are some handy email automations to try in your workflow:
Send an email notification when you move a card from one list to another. It’s as simple as dragging a card!
Reply to emails in Trello with just one click! Set up a button automation to send out a templated email response.
Let automation take care of your follow-up emails! This useful Trello automation can automatically send a follow-up email after a chosen number of days.
For more information and ideas, check out our beginner’s guide to Trello automation rules.
Keep your team aligned with Trello automation libraries
Sharing Trello automations helps your team stay organized, reduces busy-work, and makes sure everyone is following the same processes. By using Trello automation libraries you can streamline your workflow and keep things running smoothly across your boards – making collaboration better and more efficient for everyone.
