Item: Airtable
Rating: 10
Author: Jayme Kreitinger

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At CCIS, we use Airtable across the whole of our organization. We track our communications and member engagement outreach, social media, plan our annual conference, manage intern schedules, and even track our strategic planning and goals throughout the year.

Pros and Cons

We love using Airtable as a CMS! The relational aspect and linking to other tabs makes it easy for different employees to use the same data sets for a variety of reasons without any particular tab or view getting to cluttered for use.
We use Airtable to plan our annual conference, from the logo design to sponsorship opportunities to coffee breaks! The variety in field options and flexibility of the database allow us to do all the planning necessary with just one web app.
The polls feature is a great way to hold electronic votes, whether it's our members or the board. All records are then tracked in the same base as the initiative or project, making it easy to reference when needed.

I have the same three people on several teams as a way to break up the bases. It's a lot to have one team with 20 bases, so we break them up into much smaller groups. Then when it comes to paying, I have to add them all back into the one paid group or I'm double, triple paying for the same people. Very frustrating to not have sub-folders or sub-categories within each team.

Return on Investment

Airtable has made a positive impact on our organization by creating one app that allows us to do the vast majority of our work tracking and planning, in a fun and user friendly way.
I previously used other task trackers and could not get employees to keep them up-to-date. Something about the visuals of airtable, the micro movements, etc... that my team loves!

Alternatives Considered

Excel is only good for numbers, not words or relational database. Access is too complicated for a total novice to build databases from scratch.
Task trackers and project planners like Asana have limited functionality.

Other Software Used

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Likelihood to Recommend

Airtable is great for non-profits or small organizations that need one application to do a lot of different things. It's visual, which means employees are more likely to enjoy engaging with it and the user interface is easy! You can keep it simple, or take a few minutes to learn tutorials for more complex and cooler features. For example, as a membership organization we use one base for all our work with members. We have a main base on the first tab and link it to several other tabs to track information such as if membership invoices were sent and received, when our last communication was with that member, contacts and addresses, and more. If we update the main base with a new contact, it's automatically updated in all the other tabs so we don't have to worry about updating the information is several places.

Airtable keeps my team productive and happy!

Overall Satisfaction with Airtable