C53 Mentorship Application Automation

A simpler application pipeline.

I rebuilt and consolidated the mentorship application automation for StoryboardArt.org into a single live workflow connecting Gravity Forms, Kit, Google Sheets, Slack, and Pipedrive.

The previous setup was spread across several separate Zaps for application logging, qualification, Kit tagging, and Pipedrive deal creation. The goal was to simplify the workflow without changing the existing sales process, while preventing duplicate records and keeping UTM attribution working correctly.

One submission. Several possible outcomes.

A single mentorship application needed to support several different outcomes. Applicants could be disqualified because they were beginners, were not ready to invest, or had less than five hours available each week. Qualified applicants needed to continue into the sales pipeline.

Each result also had to update several services correctly:

• Kit: subscriber tags and attribution
• Google Sheets: application records
• Slack: sales-team notifications
• Pipedrive: contacts, deals, pipeline stages, and application data

The existing automation was divided across multiple overlapping Zaps, which made the process harder to maintain and increased the risk of duplicate processing.

Four conditional paths in one main Zap.

I consolidated the application workflow into one main Zap with four conditional paths:

Each path handles its own Kit tagging, Google Sheets logging, Slack notification, and Pipedrive processing.

For qualified applicants, the automation also checks for an existing Pipedrive deal before creating a new one, updates the person record with the application answers, creates the qualified deal, and updates the deal with the required application data.

The consolidated workflow, as built.

The actual Zap build shows the Gravity Forms trigger, conditional routing, and connected services across all four paths. Select the screenshot to enlarge it.

Campaign attribution preserved.

I also validated the full UTM attribution flow after the consolidation. Gravity Forms captures the five campaign parameters:

These are passed into Kit through the existing C53 attribution workflow and stored in Kit’s referrer_utm_parameters.

A live test confirmed all five UTM values reached Kit correctly after the consolidation.

Live validation across every path.

I ran live submissions through all four application paths before completing the migration. The tests verified:

• Correct Gravity Forms routing
• Correct Kit tags
• One Google Sheets row per submission
• Pipedrive person creation
• Qualified and unqualified deal creation
• Correct pipeline and stage assignment
• Correct deal values
• Pipedrive custom-field mappings
• Duplicate prevention
• Qualified person-field updates
• UTM attribution into Kit

During QA, I found and corrected several mapping issues, including deal-title formatting, deal value placement, the App Submitted? field, and a duplicated email mapping in the qualified Google Sheets path.

After the fixes, all four paths passed the live validation.

One connected workflow. A clearer sales process.

The C53 mentorship application now runs through one consolidated automation instead of several overlapping application-processing Zaps.

The final workflow was tested live across every qualification path, UTM attribution was confirmed in Kit, and the old overlapping Zaps were disabled and retained only as rollback options.

The result is a simpler, easier-to-maintain application pipeline with consistent routing from Gravity Forms through Kit, Google Sheets, Slack, and Pipedrive.

Have a workflow that needs simplifying?

Let’s connect the forms, records, notifications, and sales tools your team relies on.