How no/low-code can boost your organisation

A quick overview of how we use no-code and low-code tools to smoothen our internal operations

It’s 2022 and you want to develop some tools to smooth over some internal processes in your organisation. You already have some great ideas about the CRM, marketing content manager, deal flow tool … that you would need for your team to thrive. There is only one tiny little problem that holds you back: you don’t have an army of developers at your disposal or any coding skills yourself! An insurmountable problem you would think … or does it have to be?

The last couple of years we’ve seen a booming trend in no-code and low-code platforms popping up. These platforms allow you to build different tools, apps, websites, web shops … without having to write a single line of code.

At Academics For Technology (AFT) we’ve tried our hands at some of these no- and low-code tools to automate some of our internal processes and improve how our team can work together. Here are three examples of what we build.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Our organisation runs on funds provided by partnering companies. Our Business Relations team has to contact and manage all these relationships with hundreds of companies and even more people who work for these companies. In the past, multiple excel sheets were used but since this method was file based, files were lost and data went out-of-date. This method works for a small amount of companies and contacts that are managed by a single person. Fast-forward to today and we have multiple people and teams that need to access a lot of contact information. Time for an update in the way we work.

There are many ready-made solutions out there that could help us out, like Hubspot, Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365. The thing with these is that most of them are quite expensive for a small non-profit, too complex or totally not customizable to our needs. With the help of Airtable, a no-code/low-code relational database, we we’re able to make a simple database that tracks all the information that we need about companies, contacts and even deals. The great thing about Airtable is that we can customize it how we want it, give the right people access to the right data and add a couple of automations to remind us who we need to contact or send some reminders.

Marketing Management Tool

Engaging with your audience and convincing them to come to your events is something that most student organisations in Leuven struggle with. Next to coming up with witty content, our marketing team also has to juggle all of the social media platforms we’re active on. Having a clear content calendar is something that doesn’t seem like a big deal in the beginning. But once you’re working with a bigger team and you want to market multiple events simultaneously, you need a clear plan of who does what for what channel.

The time of spreadsheets is long gone and once again Airtable comes to the rescue. Airtable makes it easy to run multiple campaigns at the same time, plan posts and divide the work between our marketing team. The fact that you can view the same data in multiple ways makes it easy to understand it in different contexts. For example the grid view that makes it easy to understand when you’re used to spreadsheets, or the calendar view or kanban. To incorporate input from the event-teams we’ve worked out a feedback workflow so they have to approve all the content for their event. This way multiple people look at the images/videos/text before we post, so we’re able to catch most mistakes before it’s too late.

Event Registrations

Our main goal at Academics For Technology is to inspire and excite as many students about the wonderful world of technology, entrepreneurship and innovation. An effective way to do this is by organising events about these topics. The data we get from our registrations is very valuable for both our internal marketing team as well as for our partners who want to know what students they are able to reach through our activities.

The registrations come in through our website and are yet again sent to Airtable. With the help of formula & roll-up fields we can summarize our audiences in key-metrics. The Interface feature then lets you build custom dashboards. This lets us evaluate marketing strategies, see how high our dropout rate is, where our attendees found out about us and much more. All automatically in the wink of an eye.

Conclusion

No-code and low-code tools do have their drawbacks. They’re often less robust or not as secure as third party applications or custom tools built specifically for the job. There are also limits to what each tool can do and sometimes a couple of lines of code could easily do the job of a very complex no-code automation. But in general they’re very quick to develop by everybody. They are often quite cheap to use compared to very specific tools and they let you customize the tool the way that you want the software to work.

For us, they mainly help us to move away from spreadsheets and establish a single source-of-truth. Something that is oh-so-important when working with multiple people on the same data. On top of that, it allows us to automate mundane tasks and internal communication. For our relatively small team they are making a real difference.