Airtable: The Best Tool You’ve Never Heard Of
…and a few others you should check out
I’m a software nerd. I love discovering the latest productivity apps and diving into them. I beta test the ones I like, and recommend them to anyone I encounter that is dealing with a particular problem. Of all the apps I use, there are two that I recommend to almost everyone: Slack and Airtable. Slack is already pretty well-known, but I find that most people I speak to have never heard about Airtable. I only discovered it a year ago, when I was browsing through the apps directory in Slack.
At the time, I was working on trying to find a better solution to a membership management system for my fraternity, La Unidad Latina. As the Officer of Operations, I was infuriated that I had yet to find a good enough solution to one of the most basic challenges that any large non-profit deals with: tracking membership data. We’ve gone through three different platforms since I’ve been a member of the organization (going on 10 years now), and none have met our needs.
The most recent one over-promised and severely under-delivered; like many businesses that lack focus, it wanted to be everything for every customer — a CRM, form builder, email marketing platform, payment portal, event builder, fundraising platform, website portal, and so on. Instead, it failed on all fronts. As a result of this and other similar experiences, I have adopted the view that it is always better to integrate multiple solutions that each do one thing very well, than to try to find one solution that claims to do everything. But in order to do that, I had to figure out a way to manage data that didn’t require programming databases.
Enter Airtable.
When I first came across it, I thought that it was just another online spreadsheet solution, but prettier. However, once I started playing with it, I discovered that it was in fact a database builder for non-programmers. And thus, a whole new world opened up to me.
All of a sudden, I had the freedom and control to take data and move it around. I could pull in all my disparate sources of member data and bring it into one location. I could break out the data in a way that made sense to us while still keeping it all connected. I could use Zapier (another amazing tool) to feed the new member application data from Typeform into Airtable. Now we had an easy way to track all of our applicants. I could do the same with Moonclerk and finally set up payment plans so that our members could pay their dues over time. I could automate a bunch of administrative tasks that involved updating the database and in turn, free up our officers to focus on more important work.
In sum, I became an operations badass.
Airtable was a godsend. It became my muse for discovering better ways to make use of our data. In tandem with Zapier, it became the sandbox for figuring out new ways to streamline processes. It is now the central hub for anything that I do with data. And the best part is, because it’s evident that Airtable has the sort of culture that is focused on doing right by the customer, they are constantly improving their product, adding new features, responding to customer inquiries, and building the sort of collaborative community that enables them to continue to grow and deliver. This sort of customer service is what sets them apart from most other companies and what results in someone like me evangelizing on their behalf.
I realize I’m gushing here, but I promise that I am not an Airtable shill nor am I in any way affiliated with the company.
Before I wrap up this post, I wanted to provide some tool combinations involving Airtable for addressing common organizational challenges. All of these apps use the “freemium” model, so you can get started immediately without cost and once you start scaling up, you can purchase a relatively affordable monthly subscription:
Member Dues Collection
- Setup your payment plans and payment forms in Moonclerk.
- Use Zapier to feed the data (including any custom fields) into your membership database and change the member’s status to “active”.
- Use a formula in Airtable to automatically change the member to “inactive” once the membership period ends.
Membership (and Contact) Management
Typeform + Zapier + Airtable
(while Airtable has a form feature, as of this writing, it is not possible to update an existing record nor include form logic, which is why I recommend using Typeform)
- Create a form for anything in Typeform (paid version allows for form logic).
- Use Zapier to update member records in your membership database.
Agile Project Management
Airtable’s Kanban feature
Use one of Airtable’s project management templates to plan out your project and invite your team as collaborators to track and manage work. While not yet as evolved as Trello, you can still use it for tracking work in a Kanban manner.
Event Planning
Use one of Airtable’s event planning templates to plan and track the event schedule, budget, locations, speakers, attendees, and anything else you need to plan a successful event. You can even use the built-in forms feature to create a simple sign-up or registration form.
Plus Much More
This is just a fraction of the things I’ve done with the tool. There are plenty of other things you can do, so I would encourage you to check out the existing templates as well as get inspiration from the community over at Airtable Universe.
If you have any questions or additional recommendations, please let me know!
