Starting Somebody Else in a Flow from a Query

The Start Somebody Else in a Flow action enables you to initiate a separate flow for different contacts or groups when the active contact reaches a specific step. What if you need to start contacts who match certain search criteria? We’ve introduced a new feature that allows you to easily initiate flows for contacts matching your specified query.

In the following example flow, we’ve prompted a school guidance counselor to provide the first three letters of a student group’s school ID. We also requested a message to forward to those students in a subsequent flow. We then initiated contacts matching the query school_id = @results.school_id in the ‘Register SID’ flow. Only students whose IDs match the counselor’s submission will be started in the child flow. The child flow will ultimately reference the message collected in the parent flow using @parent.results.alert.

Parent Flow

Parent Flow Construction

After requesting the school ID from the counselor, we collect this information using a ‘Wait for Response’ action and save it to a new contact field named ‘Student ID’, referenced as @results.school_id:

Next, we ask the counselor to compose a message for the students. All text provided by the counselor is saved using another ‘Wait for Response’ action, with the result named ‘Alert’ and referenced as @results.alert:

After gathering all necessary data from the counselor, we initiate the students in a child flow called ‘Register SID’:

To configure this step:

1. 1. Select the ‘Start Somebody Else in a Flow’ action from the dropdown menu when creating a new node

   2. Choose the option Select recipients from a query

3. Use the query school_id = @results.school_id (based on our example’s contact field)

4. Select the target flow for the recipients

All students matching the query will be initiated in the ‘Register SID’ flow.

Remember to separate words with underscores rather than spaces.

Child Flow Implementation

The final step involves forwarding the message text collected in the parent flow’s ‘Wait for Response’ result (named ‘Alert’) using @parent.results.alert within the child flow:

By referencing this result from the parent flow, students receive the complete message text sent by the counselor:

This completes the process! For additional implementation examples, including using the ‘create a new contact’ option that generates empty contacts in your chosen flow, please see our comprehensive article on using Start Somebody Else in a Flow.