No more Excel spreadsheets for us!
April 09, 2018
No more Excel spreadsheets for us!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Airtable
We are using Airtable across our organization. We use it to plan events, track grant applications, schedule social media and to create application forms to embed on our website.
- We are a nearly all-volunteer organization, which means we are in a constant state of personnel change. Thanks to Airtable's ability to upload just about any document, we can keep everything in one place when we plan events -- communications, templates, invoices, etc. When we hand off event records to a new volunteer, there's no more need to give access to ten different folders on Google Drive, or track down old file folders in someone's stored in someone's garage.
- We have multiple volunteers supporting our social media channels. Keeping track of who is posting what and when is critical, but it can be very challenging. Airtable makes it easy for us to track our workflow and coordinate our online publications.
- Small non-profits are often caught between keeping track of grants and stewarding donors with a clunky excel sheet or spending a lot of money for a complicated online system with a large learning curve. We've been able to avoid both of those by using Airtable. By tweeking a prebuilt Airtable template, we're saving time and money.
- I am a very visual person and I would LOVE to be able to color-code cells within a database.
- We noticed when we created our last form that when a multiple choice radio button item is included it ends with the words, "add an option." Those words cannot be removed or modified, and don't make sense within the context of most questions (it should really read choose an option).
- Airtable has definitely saved us money! The annual cost of a paid subscription to Airtable is less than what it would cost us monthly to use donor management software.
- excel and Wild Apricot
Airtable is far more flexible than Excel, much more suitable for our purposes, and much easier to learn and to train others who are not familiar with spreadsheets or databases.
We currently use Wild Apricot for our member database, but I expect we will be able to move to Airtable when our contract with Wild Apricot expires next year. Wild Apricot does a lot of things, but there is little flexibility in its database functions. As we learn more about Airtable, I am confident that we will be able to build a database that better meets our needs and is more nimble and easier to learn.
We currently use Wild Apricot for our member database, but I expect we will be able to move to Airtable when our contract with Wild Apricot expires next year. Wild Apricot does a lot of things, but there is little flexibility in its database functions. As we learn more about Airtable, I am confident that we will be able to build a database that better meets our needs and is more nimble and easier to learn.