Tech review: Airtable

With the wrong tools and approach, it’s easy to get bogged down with data, slowing decision-making and action. That’s why “relational databases” such as Airtable have emerged – to make it easy for teams to act on the data they have in a range of different contexts.

 

Branded as an evolution from the traditional spreadsheet, the tool allows users to create their own connected apps to suit unique needs and workflows. In this review, our Head of Partnerships Lisa Chomette considers how effectively Airtable works for our charity team.

 

 

In one word

 

Intuitive! It’s very user-friendly and easy to create a dashboard or import records. You can build as you go.

 

 

Uses

 

Tracking marketing campaigns

 

All the marketing campaigns we do with our partners need to be tracked. For example, we need to be able to see:

• What elements are composing their campaigns
• What months they are taking place in
• Whether there is any product listing associated with it
• All the topics they need to be associated with
• The type of content they are working on with us

Airtable helps us organise different views for different people so that colleagues will see the information in a format that is easy to understand, with the right information at the right time, without having to use too many filters.

 

 

Customer relationship management

 

We also use  it to deal with leads, so all the interactions with our charity prospects are locked and followed. Again, it is very easy to create different views and apply the relevant filters so that one person can see quickly and efficiently what they need to do and when.

 

We also use Airtable’s automation feature which enables us to automatically send reminders to leads that haven’t re-engaged in a long period of time. This is an excellent time saver, enabling our team to focus on other more pressing tasks.

 

 

Checking in with the team

 

We also use Airtable to check in with our colleagues each week. We use it as a form so people can enter their “snippets”, stating the tasks we are working on and sharing that information with the organisation – but also sharing things that we enjoyed the past week.

 

Everyone receives a reporting of everybody’s replies every week, which is an interesting way to understand what teams are working on across the organisation.

 

 

Features

 

The most notable features are the ability to create different views and apply filters. This makes it far easier to use than an Excel spreadsheet, for instance, because for one dashboard you can have as many different views as you want.

 

It also includes a lot of different types of fields, and the ability to add numbers and create sums, which makes it a very good tool to extract some simple reporting. There are also a lot of extensions, including the pie chart which is very helpful.

 

 

The learning curve

 

Using the product for the first time wasn’t a steep learning curve at all. It was all smooth and intuitive. I first started by importing a large Excel spreadsheet and it was easy to find the right column and identify the most common fields.

 

It was easy to move from Excel to Airtable to sort data and understand it. I also like the fact that it has a lot of different colours for categories which make it easy for visual people like me.

 

The only downside is when, in the past, we imported information that had dates in them, the formatting wasn’t the most helpful. It was a bit hard to correct. However, I think that’s mostly down to the formatting on the original file.

 

 

Value for money

 

Airtable has free, paid, and Enterprise plans. For the different levels of paid versions, you get a certain number of records, automation runs, attachments, and other features.

 

So, it is good value for money, especially if you are using just a few dashboards and multiple views in each of these dashboards.

 

 

Pros and cons of Airtable

 

I would say that the massive Pro is the fact that it is intuitive, easy to use, and is very flexible when you are importing a file from another platform.

 

I would say, however, than a Con is the limit in the number of extensions you can have and the fact that if you are trying to use Airtable as a mini customer relationship management system, the information can become hard to read.

 

 

Final score

 

I would give the product an 8 out of 10 score because I think this is a fantastic way of managing a lot of records and making sense of the data with good analysis tools and without having to be a CRM expert.

 

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Lisa is the Head of Partnerships at Charity Digital. She drives the growth and development of strategic partnerships with organisations operating in the charity sector.