Item: Airtable
Rating: 9
Author: Andy Havens

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The content marketing group is using Airtable to help plan communications projects. I needed a way to track multiple projects that might share some common elements but not all, and the ability to apply different views based on user or reporting needs.

Pros and Cons

It's very easy to use. I was able to start from scratch and get a pretty complex workflow set up in just a couple hours.
The ability to create one "master table" with every piece of possible information is good for the "deep dive" members of the team, but then it's easy to create views and calendars based on just a few pieces of data that are better for one specific use or person.
Being able to store draft content on the system as attachments means that the review copy/image can be included in the workflow rather than as a separate email or in another tracking system.
The ability to quickly group, sort and filter on the master table make it easy for the power-users to work with the full set of information, but still find a specific project quickly.

It would be great to have multi-tiered selection options. So if I check a box-like, "Does this need social support?" I could then pick from a multi-select drop-down based on the choice.
It would be good if we could have a kanban view built off a selection from a multi-select since some projects might be part of multiple strategic initiatives.
It would be cool if forms could have some basic if/then functionality. As it is, we need to create different forms for different media requests that share 75% of the same data.

Return on Investment

Too early to tell. I hope that it will allow for both a task-specific view that helps people keep on schedule with projects and higher-level views that help with tactical and strategic planning.

Alternatives Considered

Social Studio and Asana

We do use Social Studio and Sharepoint for other tasks, but for project planning across a wide variety of deliverables, there wasn't enough flexibility all the time. Asana was harder to use and get into and didn't provide an easy way to adjust views/sorts.

Other Software Used

Social Studio, Microsoft Office 365

Likelihood to Recommend

I'd say if you're looking to consolidate project details across a number of functions where there's a lot of overlap, Airtable is a great choice. We've got a relatively small team of content creators and project managers, but we are often involved in a wide variety of media, content types and deliverables. So it helps to be able to put every activity on one master spreadsheet, but then be able to pull out views that pull out only select pieces of info for specific projects or strategies. The ability to search across fields means you can also use hashtags for folks who want to be able to locate their work using person-specific queues that don't need to be agreed-upon as part of the overall design of the table.

I wouldn't recommend it if you're looking for a content repository specifically or a DAM. It could do that in a very limited sense, but not if you're wanting to store large graphic or video assets. Also, as far as I can tell, you can't publish directly to social accounts from Airtable. So you'll still need to port your content directly to your social accounts or a platform manager like Social Studio.

Enjoying Airtable as we're learning its strengths

Overall Satisfaction with Airtable