Most users know how to schedule content changes to automatically publish, but did you know you can also use it to automate your engagement activities? In this tutorial, we'll learn how to automate tasks like opening and closing surveys to save you time and effort.

The ability to schedule content for automatic publishing at a selected date and time has been available in Social Pinpoint for some time. Most users know how to use this to seamlessly replace existing content, add new documents to a page or even publish new pages entirely.

However, many users don't know that the scheduling features also work for changes made to the settings of a tool, not just for content changes.

You can take advantage of this feature to automate tasks like opening or closing activity at a certain time, enabling new functionality like voting on the Gather tool, or making the results of a Social Map public after an initial private period.

Let's look at how we can use the scheduling features to automatically close a survey at a future date and time. In this example, we'll assume you've already created a survey and it will be live for a three week period, closing on Sunday 11:59 pm in the final week.

Typically, once a survey is finished, you navigate to the Block Settings of the survey, toggle the Activity Status switch to Off, save the changes and publish the new version of the page. This stops any new contributions from coming in.

The issue here is that someone needs to be available at the exact time the survey needs to close. If this is outside business hours or you get tied up in a meeting, it may not be possible or practical to do this. In our case, where the survey will close late at night on a weekend, nobody is willing to stay awake to close the survey. This is where we can automate the task using the scheduling features of Social Pinpoint.

To do this, we follow the usual steps to turn the activity to 'Off' (as described above). However, instead of clicking the Publish button, we click the clock icon next to the publishing button instead. This opens the scheduling features where you can set the date and time you want to publish the changes, and then click the Schedule button to save.

After saving, a notification will display at the top-right of the screen letting you know when the current version of the page is scheduled to go live.

At this stage, the current version of the page, where the survey remains 'Open', is still live so participants can continue to leave contributions. However, on Sunday at 11:59 pm, the new version of the page we just scheduled (with the survey closed) will be published, preventing any new contributions from being submitted.

Keep in mind that you can only schedule the latest version of a page for publishing. If you need to make changes to a live version of a page but have a different version scheduled, you'll need to cancel this and re-schedule after the changes are made.

You can use the scheduling features for more than just open or closing activities as demonstrated above. Perhaps you want to accept contributions in the Social Map privately, but then make all contributions public at a certain time. How about collecting ideas through the Gather tool, and then enabling voting two weeks into the engagement?

There are limitless ways to take advantage of the numerous settings offered by Social Pinpoint, and to schedule these to save time and effort.