Published: Jan 30, 2017

The Cafe Button Project

A while back I talked about the potential value of having a button in your cafe that asked customers a simple question as they walked out the door. Perhaps “was today’s coffee better than last time?”, “will we see you again soon?” or similar.

I asked for some small donations to pay a freelancer to make a spreadsheet that could count button presses, and automatically email a daily count to the venue manager, wipe the spreadsheet, and start again each day. Thanks to those who generously contributed!!!

It’s taken far too long (I went the very cheap and slow but ultimately effective route) and I apologise, but here it is.

To make this happen you’ll either need a button from http://bt.tn or http://flic.io. Either of these connect to a service called If This Then That (IFTTT) via wifi, which creates a line in a google spreadsheet for each button press. The script then counts these each day and sends it to your email address. No fuss.

There’s a little bit of work required to set up the spreadsheet, but once you’ve done it once it’ll just keep counting forever.

This is the spreadsheet you’ll need to download.

This is a video describing what you need to do to link the spreadsheet to IFTTT and your button.

And here’s some additional information:

1. User will update email, venue, timezone, and question information in the sheet.
2. If there are more than 1 email recipients then the user should write these email addresses separated by comma (,)
3. You will have to manually set spreadsheet time according to their timezone. (I have described it in the video)
4. You will have to manually update the business close time in the sheet. (I have described it in the video)
5. This sheet will auto-update the counter.
6. If the counter reaches 1901 anytime during the day, the sheet will be cleared but the counter will continue.
7. The counter will be reset to 0 at the close of business.
8. Email will be sent from your email address to Email Recipient mentioned in the sheet at the close of business.
9. If you want to use this sheet for an additional button then just make a copy of this sheet and link it with the button through IFTTT.

If anyone actually does this then please let me know! I’d love to hear the results!!!!

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