One of the most common things I hear from people who are curious about automation: “I know I should be automating things, I just don’t know where to start.”
It’s a reasonable place to be. The universe of things that could be automated is enormous. But the universe of things that are actually worth automating — for your specific situation, your team, your tools, your budget — is much smaller. And identifying that smaller set is exactly what an automation audit is for.
Here’s how we do it.
Step 1: Map What’s Currently Happening
Before we talk about automation at all, we want to understand your current workflow. Not the ideal workflow — the actual one.
This usually means asking questions like:
- When a new lead comes in, what happens? Who does what, and how long does it take?
- What do you copy and paste between tools on a regular basis?
- What are the tasks that keep slipping through the cracks — not because you don’t care, but because there are too many of them to track manually?
- Where does information live in your business? What tools are you using, and how connected are they?
For churches, we also ask about Rock RMS specifically: how data flows between Rock and the rest of your communications stack, where your staff spends time on manual tasks, and which relational moments (first-time visitors, lapsed donors, volunteer milestones) are important but inconsistently followed up on.
This conversation usually takes 20–30 minutes. By the end, we have a map.
Step 2: Find the Friction Points
With the map in front of us, we look for friction — anywhere that:
- Something time-sensitive depends on a human remembering to do it
- The same information is being entered in more than one place
- A response to a customer or donor is delayed because it requires manual attention
- A task regularly gets done late — or not at all — because it’s tedious
These are the automation candidates. Not all of them are worth building, but they’re worth evaluating.
Step 3: Score by Impact and Effort
Not all automations are equal. Some take two hours to build and save 30 minutes a week. Others take the same two hours and save 5 hours a week — or prevent a customer relationship from going cold.
We score each candidate on two axes: Impact (how much time does it save? how much revenue or relationship risk does it address?) and Effort (how complex is the workflow? how many tools need to be connected?).
High-impact, low-effort automations go first. Those are the quick wins — the ones that prove the value of the investment and start compounding immediately.
The Automations We Find Most Often
After doing this across churches and small businesses, there are patterns. The same friction points come up again and again.
For churches: donor follow-up (first gift, lapse, milestone), first-time visitor welcome sequences, volunteer onboarding communications, group membership change notifications, event registration confirmations and reminders.
For small businesses: lead response and nurture sequences, appointment confirmation and follow-up, CRM updates from form submissions, invoice and payment trigger workflows, re-engagement sequences for cold contacts.
If you’re doing any of these manually right now, there’s a very high chance they’re worth automating.
What Comes Out of the Audit
At the end of the audit, you have three things:
- A prioritized list of 2–4 automation opportunities, ranked by impact and effort
- A plain-language description of what each automation would do — no jargon, just “when X happens, Y gets sent, and Z gets updated”
- An honest assessment of what it would take to build — time, tools, cost
There’s no pressure to move forward. Some people take the audit and build the automations themselves. Some come back to us when the timing is right. Some hire us on the spot. The audit stands on its own.
It’s 30 minutes. And for most businesses, it changes how they think about their time.
Ready to find out what’s worth automating in your business or church? Schedule your free automation audit — we’ll have a clear map for you by the end of the call.
