Why I'm an Airtable Fangirl
April 03, 2018
Why I'm an Airtable Fangirl
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Airtable
Blackbox is a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit that provides intensive programs and services to startup founders across the globe. We use Airtable on a day-to-day basis as a dynamic database, bringing together key information on our alumni, applicants, speaker & mentor community, partners & funders, and more. Throughout our program planning cycle, we also use Airtable to put together our program curriculum, agenda, and internal logistics schedule. Finally, we're thrilled to be able to use Airtable forms to seamlessly link our application form to the program planning process and allow applicants and partners to track their application status through shareable views.
We depend on Airtable to ensure all of our information is beautifully, intuitively organized and accessible in one place, and to collaborate as a team on important long-, medium-, and short-term objectives.
We depend on Airtable to ensure all of our information is beautifully, intuitively organized and accessible in one place, and to collaborate as a team on important long-, medium-, and short-term objectives.
- Ability to link across tables, allowing information from one "sheet" to always be viewed in context with other relevant information
- Ability to customize columns to have many different functions (single/multi select dropdowns, numbers, email address, attachments, of course long and short text, and more)
- Ability to change and save "views" of the same table so that different team members can easily access different configurations of the same information depending on the task at hand; plus the ability to create shareable views for an external audience where our team can control what's visible
- Linking across bases: We basically use one big "HQ" base as a pared down CRM where we store all our contacts and their basic info, then link them to separate, more detailed tabs for our Speaker Network, Entrepreneur Network, Funders/Partners, Country Profiles, etc. This is great, but we also use Airtable to manage our application process (startups applying for our quarterly program) and plan the program itself (where it becomes more of a project management tool). Right now, we have to copy and paste our entire Speaker Network tab from the HQ base into the Program Planning base 4x/year, and any update we make to either of these places doesn't reflect in the other. It's super frustrating and creates additional work and lots of confusion. I'm not sure what the technical challenges of allowing users to link bases are, but even if you could just link one "main" tab from a base into other bases that would allow that to be the central nervous point for the whole workspace/team, that would be massively helpful.
- Smoother integrations: We've been able to hack Airtable to almost work like a CRM in terms of organizing and even automatically collecting some data on our network via Zapier integrations, but the Gmail integration doesn't quite do the trick. We want to be able to log email correspondence with important contacts (which I've tried to set up through a labelling system via that Zap), but it's still pretty janky. Any chance of your team offering a direct integration to Gmail that works more smoothly? This one piece would enable us to just stick with Airtable vs adding on Salesforce....
- Airtable has allowed us to streamline and automate almost all of our repeatable processes, saving loads of team time.
- Airtable has allowed us to document and store critical information on our network, then share select pieces of this information with an external audience via a shareable view link, meaning less back and forth emails to keep stakeholders updated.
- Airtable has allowed us to embed our application form on our website and have all applicant data feed directly into our database for scoring and program planning,
- google sheets, Salesforce and Trello
This tool has 100x the functionality/usability of Excel or Google Sheets, is much more flexible and user-friendly than Salesforce if you don't have the technical know-how on your team to customize (Salesforce does have far more advanced and intelligent CRM capabilities).