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Gravity Flow: Power Up Your Gravity Forms for the Ultimate WordPress Workflows!

By Gravity Forms Published June 21, 2021

One of our Certified Developer partners, Gravity Flow has been a very powerful addition to the Gravity Forms platform since their launch almost six years ago. Designed for building custom WordPress workflows to automate business processes, Gravity Flow’s best-in-class workflow tools have been adopted by customers of all sizes from over 100 countries across the globe, including uses in government departments, financial services, universities, tech companies, the fashion industry, and more.

In this post, we’re going to have a look at just a few of the diverse ways in which Gravity Flow is used across the world hand-in-hand with Gravity Forms: from an American community church streamlining their events processes to a Dutch web development company building sites for regional funding initiatives.

Gravity Flow is the perfect solution whether you’re using it for your internal workflows, for client-facing form services, or if you’re creating solutions for clients yourself. Whatever your use-case, Gravity Flow and Gravity Forms can help.

To start with, let’s pack our bags (and sunglasses) and jet off to Palm Beach, Florida…

Case Study 1: Gravity Flow saves time and organisational stress for Boca Raton Community Church

The Client

Boca Raton Community Church is a church in Florida with a thriving events calendar. The Gravity Flow team spoke to Joanne, their webmaster, about how she used Gravity Flow to make the Events Director’s life much easier…

The Problem

“We host 75-100 individual events per week, ranging from small meetings to large assemblies. Believe it or not, until a few years ago we managed our entire event process with paper forms! In the past, many “balls got dropped”–for example, a room got double booked, or the maintenance folks didn’t turn on the A/C before an event.

Understandably, things got to a breaking point and our events director screamed for help. We didn’t have a large budget to hire an outside consultant or systems analyst, but we did have a webmaster (me!) with a good understanding of WordPress.”

The Solution

The situation was clearly unsustainable, but thankfully, Joanne found a solution:

“Gravity Flow was there for us to solve the problem. When we mapped out our swim lane diagrams, we were amazed at how complex our process really was. But Gravity Flow could handle it! Things run a lot more smoothly now. And it has really reduced our event director’s cognitive load. When she eventually left our organization a year or so later, I was able to train her replacement in one afternoon.”

The Benefits

“In addition to the low cost, we have really appreciated the power and flexibility of Gravity Flow. One of the unforeseen benefits of configuring the workflows ourselves is that we can continually tweak it as new needs arise. I’ve done that every few months, so our system keeps getting better and better. We’re big fans of Gravity Flow!”

It’s clear that if you want to streamline your organization’s backend processes and make your life easier, Gravity Flow is one of the best tools for the job. But what about frontend, client-facing processes? Can Gravity Flow provide an effective means of communicating with your clients in a functional, easy-to-use manner? Let’s head on over to the UK to find out…

Case Study 2: Gravity Flow helps Nuush design Bespoke Nutrition plans for their clients

The Client

Nuush is a nutrition and lifestyle company that sells subscriptions for access to nutrition plans, with the primary aims of helping people have a better relationship with food and getting them active outdoors in the health-giving power of nature.

The Problem

Up until September 2020 Nuush had been running their business on a custom-built system coded by a couple of fresh-out-of-university students who were looking to build their own portfolio and start their own web design company. Although it worked really well, it had its flaws and it was clear that as web standards progressed, a more robust, directly-managed solution was necessary.

It was clear that Nuush could benefit from bringing everything in-house. Thomas Jonston, their site manager, told us:

“We’re a tiny team of three and none of us are coders, but I have healthy knowledge of WordPress and knew that with its incredible ecosystem of plugins we’d be able to recreate, and eventually improve upon, what we already had.”

One of the major challenges came when they came to rebuild their client-facing workflows:

“One of the biggest hurdles was recreating our Bespoke Nutrition plans where a client submits a detailed schedule for the upcoming week, we’d use that information to write a unique nutrition plan for them which they accessed through their account. They could then add feedback through the week and we’d respond accordingly. In the original custom-built system it was all contained and logical.”

“In WordPress I knew I could recreate all of the forms (schedule, nutrition plan, feedback) with Gravity Forms – and make them look good – but I had no idea how to link them and make one flow into the next in that self-contained way.”

The Solution

Gravity Flow enabled Thomas to recreate the entire Bespoke Nutrition workflow himself – even if it wasn’t entirely plain sailing to start with.

“It’s fair to say that I struggled with the power of Gravity Flow. I knew it could do what I needed but I couldn’t make sense of the workflow processes involved – nothing to do with the plugin itself; the actual logical process of mapping out the steps was beyond me! I want to compliment the high level of support I got from the Gravity Flow team while rebuilding my business in WordPress, who went above and beyond to help me. I’m truly grateful, because without the Gravity Flow plugin, and their incredible support, a core part of my business simply wouldn’t exist, or at least it would be a heck of a mess if it did!”

Through this case study, we can see how Gravity Flow is an invaluable tool for anyone creating multi-step workflows that require close attention to clients’ needs.

• Implement feedback and review loops, letting users modify form entries and re-submit for review
• Implement automation in hours with Gravity Flow’s 40+ ready-to-use steps allowing you to configure even the most complex, conditional, and multi-step workflows without any programming or technical knowledge
• Implement detailed reporting to show how long each task is taking and surface bottlenecks before they become a problem

But let’s take this a step further. Many of Gravity Flow’s users are web developers who aren’t using the plugin directly for themselves; rather, they’re using it to develop large-scale solutions for clients, saving themselves a huge amount of time and bespoke coding. For our final case study, let’s shift the focus to the Netherlands…

Case Study 3: Gravity Flow gives MCMwebsites the boost they need to create powerful, feature-rich WordPress sites for clients

The Client

MCMwebsites is a Dutch web development company that specializes in building bespoke WordPress websites for a diverse range of clients from holiday rentals to municipal governments.

Getting to Grips with Gravity Flow

Marco van Wynbergen, the owner of MCMwebsites, writes:

“I got the challenge to help a foundation to set up their workflow for applications for subsidies. They, all volunteers, were struggling with physical mail and e-mail. They were investing hours upon hours to get one application through, and always losing track of what was done by who of the board. When they came to me I did know Gravity Forms already, so the step to Gravity Flow was a very small one. Every step in the application process was laid out and transferred to Gravity Flow steps.”

Using Gravity Flow for New Clients

Having used Gravity Flow once, Maco didn’t look back, and soon felt able to offer more and more complex workflow solutions to clients:

“The township of Hilversum (the Dutch “media city”) needed a workflow for spending subsidies. Initially, they needed a big application form with some forms in form repeatable fields. The project grew over time as they got acquainted with the system, from 15 steps to 31 steps.

To start with, there is an application form that needs to be filled out properly. This step can be approved, rejected or reverted back to the applicant so they can fill in any missing pieces. Then the board, or a sub-board of another area, will make their comments on each application. This is all saved in the submission. This way you always have a complete overview of the application wherever and whenever it’s needed.

In any step, notifications can be sent to the responsible people or assignee. After a certain period, an application an evaluation flow is scheduled to run. This is done over the period of months or years that a given application is running.

In this way, it’s easy to keep track of everything that’s going on, and you can always be confident that the necessary steps are taken.”

Gravity Flow: Always Adding Value

“Overall I think that the added value of Gravity Flow is efficiency in everything. Small charities and foundations are mainly run by volunteers who don’t want or don’t have time to track all steps in a flow for an application of subsidy. The age of volunteers is dropping all the time, and these people don’t want to spend time opening letters or searching for the right email for a particular application. In a way you could say that Gravity Flow is contributing to the community and making people’s lives easier.”

Gravity Flow is the ideal flexible workflow solution for any web developer looking to create bespoke solutions for their clients. Hand-in-hand with Gravity Forms, you can automate anything that requires a form, from purchase orders to admissions forms, project initiation plans to vacation requests.

Don’t Miss Out On the Certified Developer Week Discount!

In this post, we’ve seen how Gravity Flow can work for you, whether you’re looking to streamline backend, frontend, or web development solutions. No matter the use-case, Gravity Flow can help.

Why not find out more about how Gravity Flow can save your organization time, money, and stress?

And don’t forget the exclusive $50 discount available this week (06.21.21- 06.25.21) for Gravity Forms’ Certified Developer Week – available when using CDWEEK2021.