Sending leads to Gorilla Dash from Zapier

Zapier connects Gorilla Dash to thousands of other apps without any code. The Gorilla Dash app on Zapier has one action, Create Enquiry, which takes a lead from whatever triggered the Zap and lands it in Gorilla Dash exactly as if it had been submitted on one of your own website forms: same contact matching, same tribe routing, same notifications, same automations and reporting.

It also has one trigger, New Weekly Digest Article, which fires when a new article is published in your weekly digest, so you can post it to Slack, a social account or anywhere else Zapier reaches.

WHO THIS IS FOR

Anyone who can build a Zap. You do not need to read the API guides — the Zapier action does the API call for you. This guide covers everything you need to fill the action in correctly. The one place it links to the API is when you want to know exactly what happens to a lead after it lands.

Before you start

Your organisation API key and access token. Open Organisation Settings, choose Connections, and copy both from the Gorilla Dash API section. Zapier calls the access token the API Secret; they are the same thing.
The slug of the enquiry form the leads should land on. Open Enquiries, then Forms, and open the form. If you want a form just for this source, create one first — "Facebook Leads", say — so the leads are easy to tell apart.
The field names on that form. You will need them, spelled exactly, for the Custom Fields box below.
The slug of the tribe the leads should go to, if they should all go to one tribe. A tribe is one location, branch or business unit inside your organisation.
A default website set on your organisation. Without one, Gorilla Dash refuses every lead with a "default website missing" error.

THE ORGANISATION KEY SEES THE WHOLE NETWORK

If the Zap only ever sends leads to one tribe, use that tribe's key instead: open the tribe, go to Administrators, and copy the key and token from the Gorilla Dash API section near the bottom. Leads then go to that tribe automatically and the Tribe Slug box is ignored. A leaked tribe key costs you one tribe, not the network.

Connecting Gorilla Dash to Zapier

In your Zap, add an action step and search for Gorilla Dash.
Choose the Create Enquiry event.
Under Account, choose Sign in. Paste the API key into API Key and the access token into API Secret.
Zapier tests the connection straight away. If it fails, one of the two values was copied short — copy them again using the copy buttons rather than selecting the text.

The connection is saved on your Zapier account, so every Zap you build afterwards can reuse it. If someone regenerates the key in Gorilla Dash, every Zap using the old one stops working until you reconnect.

Filling in the action

Only three boxes are required: the form slug, the email address, and a name. Everything else is optional, and Gorilla Dash does the right thing when it is blank.

Box	What to put in it
Enquiry Form Slug	Required. Type the form slug. Do not map it from the trigger; it is the same for every lead.
Tribe Slug	Type the tribe slug when every lead should go to one tribe. Map it from the trigger when the source knows which location the lead is for.
Tribe Name	Route by the tribe's exact name instead. Weaker than the slug — one changed letter and it silently stops matching.
Full Name	Map the trigger's single name field here. Gorilla Dash splits it into first and last name for you.
First Name, Last Name	Map these when the trigger already has the name in two parts. You can leave both blank if you mapped Full Name.
Email	Required. Map the trigger's email field.
Mobile	Map the phone number in whatever format the source gives you. See the phone numbers section below.
Business Name	Map it only if the source reliably has it. Sending it for some leads and not others creates duplicate contacts.
Address Line 1 to Country	Map what the source knows. The address is saved on the contact and, when you have not set a tribe, used to route the lead to the nearest tribe.
Latitude, Longitude	Only if the source gives coordinates. Used for routing to the nearest tribe.
Send Notifications	Leave blank (or true) for live leads. Set to false only when you are importing old leads and nobody should be emailed or texted about them.
IP Address	Map it if the source has it. Blank is fine.
Tracking Data (JSON)	Where the lead came from, so it shows up as a lead source. See below.
Custom Fields (JSON)	The lead's answers. See below — this is the box people get wrong.

Names

Facebook Lead Ads, Calendly, Google Sheets and most booking tools give you one full name. Web form builders usually give you first and last name separately. The action takes either, so map whichever your trigger has and leave the other boxes empty.

Full Name "Dr Sam Green Jr." becomes first name Sam and last name Green. Titles and suffixes are dropped, and a compound surname like "van der Berg" stays together.
A one-word full name becomes the first name, with no last name.
If you map First Name and also Full Name, the first name you mapped is kept and only the last name is taken from the full name.
Names are expected in "First Last" order. A source that gives "Green, Sam" will be split the wrong way round — map its first and last name fields instead.

DO NOT INVENT A FIRST NAME

Older versions of the action forced you to fill in First Name, and people typed "Lead" or "Unknown" to get past it. That created one contact per email address called "Lead". Clear those boxes, map Full Name, and let Gorilla Dash do the split. If you cannot see a Full Name box, your Zap is on an older version of the Gorilla Dash app: delete the action step and add it again.

Phone numbers

Map the number exactly as the source gives it. Gorilla Dash reads it, works out the country, and stores it in international format, so +61 412 345 678, 0412 345 678, (561) 812-6035 and the "p:+1..." style Facebook uses all end up right.

A number that starts with + and a country code is trusted as written.
A number with no country code is read as a number from your organisation's country. Check the country is set under Organisation Settings; without it a local number cannot be resolved and is stored as typed.
A "+" in front of a local number — "+0412 345 678", or a US number missing its 1 — is corrected using your organisation's country.
A spreadsheet that turned "+61412345678" into the plain number 61412345678 is fine too.

Custom fields: the lead's answers

Every answer that is not a name, email, phone or address goes in the Custom Fields (JSON) box: the message, the service they want, how they heard about you, a preferred date. Because every enquiry form has different fields, the box is free text you write in a fixed shape rather than a list of pre-made boxes.

The shape is a list of pairs. Each pair has a name, which must be the name of a field on your enquiry form, and a value, which is the answer.

[{"name": "Message", "value": "Please send me a quote for 2 flags"}, {"name": "Service", "value": "Signage"}]

To build it in Zapier:

Open the enquiry form in Gorilla Dash (Enquiries, then Forms) and write down its field names. Spelling has to match; capitalisation and surrounding spaces do not.
In the Custom Fields box, type the opening [, then one {"name": "...", "value": "..."} pair per field, separated by commas, then the closing ].
Type the field name yourself between the first pair of quotes.
Click between the second pair of quotes and insert the trigger's answer from the field picker, so the pill sits inside the quotes: "value": "[pill]".
Do not put the whole list on one line if that is hard to read. Line breaks between pairs are fine; line breaks inside a value are not (see the trap below).

A Facebook Lead Ads example, with a form whose fields are Message, Service and How Did You Hear About Us:

[{"name": "Message", "value": "[What can we help with?]"}, {"name": "Service", "value": "[Which service?]"}, {"name": "How Did You Hear About Us", "value": "Facebook"}]

The last pair shows you can type a fixed value as well as mapping one. That is handy for stamping every lead from a Zap with where it came from.

A NAME THE FORM DOES NOT HAVE IS SILENTLY DROPPED

Every pair is checked against the enquiry form's field names. A pair whose name matches is saved; a pair whose name matches nothing is thrown away with no error, and the Zap still reports success. If an answer never shows up on the enquiry, this is why: compare the name in your JSON against the form, letter by letter, or add the missing field to the form.

A QUOTE OR LINE BREAK IN AN ANSWER BREAKS THE JSON

If a lead types a double quote, or presses Enter in the middle of their message, the inserted value breaks the shape and the action fails with "Custom Fields is not valid JSON". For a free-text message field, add a Formatter by Zapier step before the Gorilla Dash step: choose Text, then Replace, replace " with ' and [:newline:] with a space, and map the cleaned output into the value instead.

TWO FIELD NAMES DO EXTRA WORK

A field called Message is treated as the body of the enquiry everywhere in Gorilla Dash — notifications, the enquiry list, the AI summary — so map the lead's main question there. A field with a phone-like name (Phone, Mobile, Contact Number) is used as the contact's number when the Mobile box is empty, and a field called Business Name fills the business name the same way.

A multiple-choice question that allows several answers arrives from Zapier as a list. You can map it straight in: Gorilla Dash joins the choices with commas, so "Signage, Vehicle wraps" is what lands on the enquiry.

Tracking data: where the lead came from

Leave the Tracking Data (JSON) box empty and every lead from the Zap is reported as Direct. Fill it in and Gorilla Dash works out the lead source for you, so your reports say "Paid Social" or "Facebook — Event Catering" instead.

Same shape as custom fields, but each pair is a parameter and a value. For a Facebook Lead Ads Zap:

[{"parameter": "utm_source", "value": "facebook"}, {"parameter": "utm_medium", "value": "paid_social"}, {"parameter": "utm_campaign", "value": "[Campaign Name]"}]

The guide "Tracking where your leads come from" lists every parameter Gorilla Dash understands and what each source name means. utm_medium is the one that matters most: paid_social, cpc, email and organic each map to a source.

Testing the Zap

Use Zapier's Test step. A success shows data.id — the enquiry's id in Gorilla Dash.
Open Enquiries in Gorilla Dash and find it. Check the tribe, the contact's name and phone, and that every custom field answer is there.
Check the lead source on the enquiry is what you expected, not Direct.
Check the notification reached whoever should have got it. The text message is immediate; the email is sent by a sweep and can take up to twenty minutes, so do not report it missing before then.
Change the email address before you test again.

YOUR SECOND TEST WILL NOT APPEAR

Gorilla Dash recognises a repeat of a submission it already has — same form, name, email, message and answers — and quietly returns the original enquiry instead of creating a second one. Zapier still shows success. Change something real between tests, the email address is easiest, or you will spend an afternoon looking for an enquiry that was never meant to exist.

When the Zap fails

Open the failed run in Zapier's Zap History. The error text is written to tell you what to fix.

What Zapier shows	What it means	What to do
Custom Fields is not valid JSON	The JSON shape is broken, usually by a quote or line break inside a mapped answer.	Check the brackets and commas, then add the Formatter step described above.
Tracking Data is not valid JSON	Same problem in the tracking box.	Same fix.
401 Unauthenticated	The key or secret is wrong, or was regenerated in Gorilla Dash.	Reconnect the account with freshly copied values.
403	The API is switched off for your organisation.	Ask a Gorilla Dash administrator to enable it under Organisation Settings.
404 enquiry_form_not_found	The form slug does not match a form in your organisation.	Copy the slug from the form in Gorilla Dash; the message tells you what was sent.
409 default_website_missing	Your organisation has no default website.	A Gorilla Dash administrator marks one website as the default, then replay the run from Zap History.
422 with a list of fields	Something failed validation — no name at all, an invalid email, a value of the wrong type.	The message names the field and the rule. Fix that box.
429	Too many leads too fast.	Zapier retries on its own; if it keeps happening, throttle the trigger.
500 enquiry_not_saved	The save failed on the Gorilla Dash side. Nothing was created.	Replay the run from Zap History. If it fails again, send Gorilla Dash support the time in the message.

Ready-made Zaps

Zapier's Gorilla Dash page at zapier.com/apps/gorilla-dash/integrations lists templates for the common sources — Facebook Lead Ads, Google Ads lead forms, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Lead Generation, Typeform, Jotform, Google Forms, Gravity Forms, Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, Calendly and Google Sheets — as they are published. A template pre-fills the trigger and the Gorilla Dash action; you still fill in the form slug and the Custom Fields box, because those are yours.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE LEAD LANDS

Contact matching, tribe routing, spam checks, lead source calculation, notifications and the AI summary all run exactly as they do for a website form. The guide "Pushing an enquiry (a lead) into Gorilla Dash" walks through each step, and "How Gorilla Dash matches an enquiry to a person" explains why a Zap that sometimes sends a business name and sometimes does not will create duplicate contacts.