topic First engagement date workflow in Dashboards & Reporting

First engagement date workflow

JDavis25 — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 07:27:10 GMT

Hi, I'm looking to set up a workflow that can fill in a contact property date picker for the first activity date. I know for activities it is the first time "last activity date" is updated, but I can't seem to work out how best to make this work for engagement. Engagement is important as I want to report on any events that happen before we get engagement.

Thanks in advance,

Re: First engagement date workflow

karstenkoehler — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 07:28:12 GMT

Hi @JDavis25,

Would this out of the box property work for your use case?

Date of first engagement: the date the current contact owner first engaged with the contact.

Description of first engagement: a description of the current contact owner's first engagement with the contact.

If not, then this is going involve a few more steps. You would have to export the property history for "Last activity date", then re-import the earliest date you find in that export: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/properties/export-property-history

Once you've done so, you could set up a workflow that enrolls records where the now already populated property is empty AND where "Last activity date is known" – then copying the value into the first activity date property.

Best regards

Re: First engagement date workflow

JDavis25 — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 07:35:40 GMT

This won't be an existing property, as it needs to be independent of the contact owner.

That process you outlined seems like it is only historical, and can't be made as an ongoing auto workflow, is that right? I'd ideally like to set up a workflow which can populate "First activity date" property when certain criteria are met. The reason I'm not wanting to do this for historical data is that we have thousands of records and can't spend the time to go and check them, but going forward we can start to record.

Re: First engagement date workflow

karstenkoehler — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 07:38:35 GMT

@JDavis25 the process I outlined combines backfilling (export of property history + re-import) and ongoing automation (workflow that uses 'Edit record' to copy last activity date into first activity date).

For this to work, however, you need to first export and re-import the historical data, otherwise HubSpot will not populate enrolled records with their first activity date but their last activity date. This will only be correct for contact where the date is the same (new contacts with their first activity). If that's acceptable, then the workflow only is enough.

You can't copy the first value ever of the last activity date directly (without working with the HubSpot API).

Re: First engagement date workflow

JDavis25 — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 22:09:30 GMT

Wouldn't I have to do this for each record?

Re: First engagement date workflow

karstenkoehler — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 04:07:00 GMT

@JDavis25 no, exporting/importing is a bulk action, so would be a workflow.