Google Calendar to Stream Post (Using Zapier)

When coordinating with employees, it is often important to notify your workforce of calendar events that exist on a Google Calendar that they may not have access to.

This tutorial will be a step-by-step guide to integrating a Google Calendar with Beekeeper so that events and event descriptions in the Google Calendar are posted to a stream 30 minutes before they occur. 

Initial Knowledge and Resources

This tutorial assumes that you have visited our Beekeeper Zapier page and have the following:

• An admin-enabled, user-visible Beekeeper Bot
• An account with Zapier (a free account will work for this Zap)
• A Google Calendar account with important company-related events

Google Calendar Trigger Setup

This Zap will be started by a calendar event starting so we must first set up the trigger event.

1.) Open Zapier and begin creating a new Zap by clicking Make a Zap! in the upper right-hand corner of the window. This will open the Zapier setup page and it will ask you to Choose App & Event. 

2.) For the App, select Google Calendar, and for the event, select Event Start.

3.) Once you Continue to the Choose Account page, open the dropdown to view your connected accounts. If the calendar you wish to use is connected, select the account and continue to the next page, otherwise, choose the Add a New Account button to connect your Google Calendar. 

Keep in mind, at this step, you have not selected the specific calendar you wish to integrate yet, just the Google Account that owns the calendar.

4.) Once you've selected the account, Continue to the Customize Event page. Here, the only field that is marked as required is the Calendar field. For this, choose the dropdown and find the calendar you wish to integrate. I've chosen a calendar I created called Zapier Event Calendar.

5.) For this tutorial, we want a notice to be posted to a stream half an hour before the event starts, so we need to include the Time Before and the Time Before (Unit) fields. For these input 30 and Minutes to indicate half an hour. 

6.) In the next Find Data page, test the connection and notice that Google creates a Test Event that has all the fields populated with test values. If this successfully populates, you've completed the trigger setup!

Post the Event to a Beekeeper Stream

Now that we have a Zap that is triggered by a Google Calendar event, we want to post it to a stream!

1.) In the next Zap step, we need to choose Beekeeper as the app and Create Post as the action event. 

2.) In Choose Account, use the dropdown to select, or add the Beekeeper bot you wish to make the Stream posts. In this example, we've created an EventBot in the Beekeeper tenant to handle my posts.

3.) The next step is to Customize the Post. In this example, we've selected a stream called Company Events, created a generic title, and used the insert a field button to format a body with the event Summary and Description. 

4.) Move to the next page and test the integration. Give it a second to post and check that the post appears in your Beekeeper tenant. 

5.) Once you've confirmed the integration is working, activate the Zap by hitting the toggle in the bottom tab or the top right corner of the page.

Congratulations! You've created a fully automated event notification for your frontline workforce, enjoy all the benefits of seamless employee operations with Beekeeper.