We're thrilled to welcome Eden Halperin to the Airtable team. After stints as the lead designer at Base CRM and senior designer and engineer at Mapbox, he's joining Airtable as our new Director of Product and Design. A St Louis native and graduate of the Liberal Arts and Management program at Indiana University Bloomington, when Eden isn't in the office he enjoys biking, tinkering with product ideas, and spending time with his Vizsla, Benji.
As a designer, Eden loves working on simplifying complex user experiences. He learned to code at a young age, building subjectively beautiful websites with Dreamweaver, and still believes that designers should learn to code, if only to better understand their medium. At Airtable, he's excited to help transform the experience of working with structured data on the web.
Eden's Vizsla, Benji.
Want to work with Eden and the rest of the Airtable team? We're hiring.
How a Full-Time Mother and Home Educator Finds Balance Using Airtable
From a field trip in the Smoky Mountains.
āWe wanted to customize the learning experiences for our children around the things that are most important to our family,ā says Krista Wanderman, home educator and mother of two. āHomeschooling also offered the flexibility to arrange our schedule,ā she adds.
āWe started our oldest daughter in a more traditional classroom,ā explains Krista. āBut when we moved four years ago [from Tennessee], we wanted to give homeschooling a try. Weāve been very pleased with the results.ā
As Krista began exploring the lesson planners available specifically for home educators, she soon realized that the options were costly and inflexible. Teaching to both a 5th grader and a kindergartener, Krista needed a system to organize each child's curriculum and assignments separately. She needed a database that was adaptable to her unique case as a teacher.
āSystems like Homeschool Planet or Homeschool Helper App are great, but werenāt as customizable as I wanted them,ā Krista says. āAt one point, I even thought about working off an Excel spreadsheet.ā
But she didnāt get that chance. In August, Krista came across Airtable. āAfter playing around with it for about an hour, I knew I wanted to use this product,ā she says.
āOur community has a wealth of resources and opportunities for homeschooled students,ā says Krista. āBut keeping it all organized is a challenge!ā
Recognizing an opportunity to help other home educators, Krista reached out to Airtable, hoping to share her database with others in the community. āI thought some of my friends might find Airtable useful,ā she says.
Krista created a basic planner for record-keeping and organizing lessons. Among other features, her base includes fields for uploading lesson plans, assignments, and worksheets; a table listing textbooks that correspond with specific lessons; and a table for tracking attendance and grades.
Krista structured a database to meet her needs as a mother and educatorāand it works for her. āMost home educators do their own thing,ā says Krista. āSo a tool that allows flexibility and customization is really helpful.ā
āI need to be able to work on my mobile devices,ā explains Krista. āSometimes curriculum ideas pop up unexpectedly, like when Iām browsing educational blogs and websites. I have to document them immediately on my phone or other devices.ā
In just seconds, Krista searches for lesson plans, books, and assignments using specified filters, such as date or subject. With Zapierās integrations, she's also able to sync her Evernote, Dropbox, and Google Drive accounts in real-time with her records.
āActually, databases are my secret hobby,ā says Krista. āI feel out of practice now with the kids, but in my professional life I managed many databases.ā
Time is an especially valuable asset for this busy mother and educator. By organizing her teaching materials and lessons more effectively, Krista gets more time to spend with her family and on activities she enjoys.
āWe strive to put our faith and service to others first, we travel when we have the opportunity, we follow interests and curiosities where they take us, and we have the freedom to adapt our teaching style to the ways our children learn best,ā Krista says.
The Apex of Event Organization: How Siemer and Associates Uses Airtable
Each fall, a select group of influential figures and executives from across the digital media and technology industries descends upon Southern California.
Over the course of two days at the Siemer Summit, they hear from 30 featured speakers and 116 entrepreneurs presenting their new companies; participate in countless roundtable discussions; and celebrate the Wavemaker Awards, a culminating ceremony that draws on 50 judges from across the industry to awards startups in categories like āIPO of the Yearā and āMost disruptive company brought to scale.ā (Last yearās winner was Tinder.)
The exclusive event not only builds relationships for its host, Siemer and Associates, a boutique merchant bank offering financial guidance to leading internet and digital media companies, but it also provides a space for key players in different industries to meet, exchange ideas and learn from each other.
For Sura Hart, Marketing Manager at Siemer and lead organizer for the event, it means a whole lot of work.
In order to corral the attendees, vendors, judges, sponsors, and other moving parts involved in a major conference, Sura and her team turn to Airtable.
Developing a system of record
At Siemer, Airtable serves as the central repository for all conference-related information. Crucial details about speakers, venues and more are collected in a single database for easy reference.
For example, Hart created a table specifically for organizing event sponsors. āWe need to keep tabs on whether we received their ad and we need a place to store their contract and their payment notes. Weāve also created a table for tracking deliverables,ā Hart says.
Hart also values the ability to see the history of changes that were made. āAll of the sheets have so many people using them. Airtable is more of a database so itās a lot harder to mess up. In Excel or Google Sheets if someone deletes a cell, thereās no way to get that back. But Airtable tracks everything so you can see who deleted what and have a history of all the changes,ā says Hart.
Shepherding speakers to the stage
For exclusive events like the Siemer Summit, one of the biggest draws for attendees is the quality of the keynote speakers. In order to entice these busy, top-tier executives to participate, Sura and team start outreach almost immediately after the previous yearās event is complete. Each Siemer team member is assigned a set of potential speakers to manage, from initial outreach to the moment the final speakers walk onto the stage. The team prioritizes their outreach efforts by assigning each potential speaker to a tier, using a multiple selection field.
Over the course of the next several months, each detail about that person is centralized in this table, where owners update the status of the relationship, last contact, notes and more.
Each team member creates a separate grid view with a filter to show only the speaker records for which they are responsible.
The team uses checkboxes to indicate when specific parts of the recruitment process are complete, so they can easily scan the list to determine which individuals require followup and whether anyone has fallen through the cracks.
When Hartās team was using traditional spreadsheets, they would often update speaker status in inconsistent ways, typing āconfirmedā and ādeclinedā interchangeably with āyesā and āno.ā āIt means the same thing, but if youāre scrolling through a spreadsheet with a large amount of data, then itās really easy to miss those responses. This year, with Airtable, itās much more consistent - just a check mark to indicate whether the invite was sent,ā Hart says.
Using filters, the team can also create a custom view in Airtable to show only checked responsesāa difficult feat in a standard spreadsheet that uses inconsistent text responses.
As speakers confirm their participation in the event, team members can capture bios and headshots needed for the program and website in the same location.
Forms simplify the nomination process
Gathering nominations for awards from the Summit's judges is a significant part of the planning process and Hart uses an Airtable survey form to make collection as quick and easy as possible. She created a customized survey form to send to judges to ask them for nominations. The form funnels responses into the master outreach tracking table in realtime. With all the information saved right to the base, no one on the team has to take the time to enter it manually.
Once the nominations have been made, Hart's team uses Airtable to check everything from whether a nominee's invitation was sent to whether the possible winner has responded.
Custom views keep each team organized
Hart created customized views for her database. The āMarketingā view makes it easy for the marketing team to view all the press materials for the speakers, such as photos and logos, in one place. Having the ability to attach visual assets like logos and photos right into the base helps keep the materials organized and ready to go at a few clicks of a mouse.
The ability to track visual assets is vital to this process. āWe need to send design files to the printer and make notes on the art direction, paper stock and check whether we've sent the final design to the printer,ā Hart says.
Using advanced field types saves time
In order to minimize the amount of duplicate data that needs to be entered, Hart uses linked records and lookups. All the tables stay up-to-date if one of the fields needs to be updatedāfor example, if a prospective judge switches companiesāand team members can easily see the information they require without having to search in separate tables.
To achieve this, first she sets up a field that links to the master Contact table and selects the name of the judge. Then, she uses a lookup field to display the name of their company. Finally, she sets up the primary āNameā field as a formula which concatenates the two, all without having to re-enter any information.
What's next
The 2015 Siemer Summit was the teamās largest event to dateāin part because of Airtable. āIt wasnāt just that Airtable made our life easier,ā said Hart, āIt also broadened the scope of our ambition.ā
And now that the 2015 Siemer Summit is behind her, Hart is already thinking about ways to make future summits even more spectacular. While managing both industry heavyweights and event logistics can be a lot to handle, with her stellar planning skills and Airtable to pull together the deluge of details, Hart is ready (and excited) to tackle next year.
Okay, weāre not saying weāre basing our product roadmap on the technological achievements of the ancient Babylonians or anything, but it does seem right that after nailing down records management for the post-clay-tablet era, weāre moving on to calendars.
Starting today, youāll see a new view type nestled beside forms and grids: calendar! When you create a new calendar view, you can pick a date field to plot your records on a monthly calendar.
See your publication schedule in calendar form in just a few clicks.
Youāll also see a full list of records in the righthand sidebar. By using the dropdown menu, you can choose to see all your records, only records that are scheduled in a nice list ordered by date, or unscheduled records that you can easily drag onto the calendar to schedule.
And just like any other view in Airtable, you can easily create a shareable link to a calendar or embed it on your site.
Canāt wait to get started with calendar view? Here are a few features to try out for yourself:
Click and drag a card on the calendar to reschedule an event: Realized that youāve scheduled four stories about the ergonomics of successful lemonade stands for publication on the same day? Simply click the card for each extra story and drag it to a new day to reschedule!
Apply filters to hone in on only the events that matter most: Filters work just the same in a calendar view as in a grid view, so you can pick as many parameters as you like to narrow down the cards that get displayed. So if youāre planning a training schedule for your prize guinea pig in preparation for the guinea pig agility regional semifinals, you can easily filter to show only maze workout or wheel sprint days.
Quickly jump to the right view for your needs: Because itās easy to switch between grid and calendar views, you can quickly run through a list of records in a grid view, then effortlessly switch to see them on a calendar for a different perspective. Now you can browse the lesson plan for every session of your groundbreaking seminar on ancient Phoenician cookery in the grid view before flipping over to the calendar to get a visual sense of when theyāre scheduled.
Create new calendar views for each date field: That means if you need to create a separate calendar view for watering vs weeding days in order to optimize your rainbow kohlrabi harvest system, itās as simple as selecting the corresponding date field for each calendar view.
Want to see the calendar in action? Check out how one editor uses Airtable to manage an editorial calendar.
To learn more about how to create, edit, and otherwise manipulate the new calendar view, visit the support page. Have any questions or want to share how youāre using calendar? Drop us a note at [email protected].
Editorial calendars are an indispensable tool for streamlining the entire publishing process and ensuring a consistent output of content. From brainstorming ideas, to sending drafts off for editing, to managing art assets, to scheduling and rescheduling articlesāa good editorial calendar can make your publication-related tasks a whole lot easier.
Letās take a look at an editorial calendar template that writer and editor Laura Blackwell (previously of PCWorld and TechHive) put together showing the workings of a fictional satirical news website.
This base uses different field (or column) types to hold different types of information related to each story. Date fields can be used to coordinate scheduling, embargoes, and due dates; colorful single select fields allow you to track the current status of each story, mark the section to which a story belongs, or assign a copy editor.
The template is just a starting point, though: adding new fields to fit your own needs is simple. For example, we could easily add an attachment field to store each story's art assets.
You can further customize your base by creating different views, which are like different lenses through which you can see the same data. By hiding fields, adding filters, and applying sorts, you can create new ways to look at the table that are optimized for different purposes. These views can be saved so you can quickly reference them for future useāfor example, each editor can have their own view, which only shows the stories to which theyāve been assigned.
Airtable's calendar views also offer another way to look at your content pipeline by displaying your records as cards on a monthly calendar.
Calendar view makes it easy to change a story's publication date when you're inevitably forced to reschedule that one piece over and over againāit's as easy as dragging and dropping the record to a new date. You can also put a story on hold by dragging it to the right side of the calendar, or schedule a story by dragging it from the side onto the calendar.
Blackwell's template is just one way in which you could construct an editorial calendar in Airtable. Click here to see it for yourself. By changing and adding your own field types, creating views, and more, you can make this template your own!
The following post comes courtesy of author and database expert Stuart Gripman. Gripman has been wrangling databases for over two decades, first at FileMaker and later as the founder of Crooked Arm Consulting, a database consulting firm that has helped everyone from the U.S. space program to fine art patrons, system administrators, digital projection cinemas, vintners, oenophiles, aspiring mixologists, data recovery practitioners, architects, commercial artists, and a Grammy award-winning ensemble. He's the author of multiple books on FileMaker, including the beloved 'Missing Manual' series.
One of the greatest advantages Airtable holds over spreadsheets and documents is real-time multi-user access to all the information in a Base. It's easy to grasp how compelling that is, but wielding it effectively sometimes requires a little planning. Multiple users usually means multiple roles, each with its own needs. Showing all the information to all the users all the time is inefficient and potentially problematic. So how do we give each job role just enough information to achieve their objectives? Views.
Let's take the case of Kelly. She's the director of an art festival and maintains a Base with a row for each artist who will be participating at this year's event. Besides the artist's name, each row has information about their artistic medium, which booth number they've been assigned to, how much money they owe the festival, and everything else Kelly needs to execute the event. The festival offers optional electricity in the booths. And it's here where Views will give each user just the right amount of information.
A couple days before the festival, setup crews descend upon the site and assemble the booths. The Electrician requires a list of booths to be wired. Kelly could simply share her Director's View of the base with the setup staff, but that has everything about every artist and wading through all the extraneous information for the relevant bits it inefficient and error-prone. So let's give our electrician her own View with just the info she needs to complete her job.
A quick aside to establish terminology. Each Base contains one or more Tables of data. A Table is just that, rows and columns of data. In our Art Festival Base, we have one Table called āArtistsā with a number of columns pertaining to each Artists' involvement in the festival. To see and interact with the data in a table, we use Views. Any given view doesn't have to show all the columns or all the rows from its table. But hiding columns and filtering rows doesn't alter the contents of the table, it simply doesn't show information we don't need to see in that View.
The default View in the Art Festival Base is the Director's View. It has all the information about every artist including who ordered electricity. Our electrician just needs a list of booth numbers that require outlets so let's create that for her.
Click on Director's View and, from the menu that pops down, click Grid view. By default it's given the title āView 2ā but let's name it something more apt. As soon as a new View is created the name is automatically selected so all we need to do is type āElectricianā and press Return or Enter.
If our new Electrician View appears suspiciously like the Director's View, it's because Airtable shows us all the available columns by default. But we can winnow those down to just what our electrician needs to see. Just to the right of the View name, click that āHide Columnsā button. A handy pop-down menu shows us all available columns and, at the moment, all of them are selected. Uncheck all of them except Booth Number. Now we've got it down to just the columns she needs to see- the name of the artist and the booth numbers.
āBut wait!ā you're saying. She needs to see which artists get electricity. Why would we hide that column? Giving users exactly the amount of information they require isn't solely about the columns. If we show every row, we're still making our Electrician do more work than necessary by forcing her to look at every single artist just to determine which ones get electricity. Let's spare her that burden by automatically hiding all the artists who haven't requested wiring by adding a Filter to our View. Click on the āAdd Filtersā button, then click āadd a filterā. To the right of the word āWhereā click to select āElectricityā then check the box next to āisā. Our row count shrinks from 50 to 24 but nothing has been deleted, we've just filtered the non-electric rows from this view and the electrician can be certain that if the artist is in her view, they've requested electricity.
Now our electrician has a focused list enumerating only the artists who requested power and hiding the columns that are impertinent to the task. But let's give her one more thing: a way to keep track of which booths have been wired. Click on the + to the right of Booth Number to make a new column. Type āElectric Completeā then click on āSingle Line Textā and change it to āCheckboxā. Finally click Save.
The electrician can mark off the booths as they're wired and Kelly, our intrepid Festival Director, will be able to keep an eye on the progress from her office in real time. This automatic updating between views flows both ways. As artists opt for electricity or change their minds and opt out, the Electrician view will seamlessly maintain the correct list of artists.
Let's reflect on what we've achieved. Starting from a director's view that shows all the information about every artist in the festival, we've identified a need to provide a targeted subset of that data to the electrician. By creating a new view, hiding some columns, and applying a filter, we can now present exactly the information the electrician needs, nothing more and nothing less.
The power of Airtable Views helps every user focus of just the information necessary to complete their objectives. And changes to data in one View automatically appear in every other View based on the same Table. Now everyone can me more efficient, accurate, and reliably up to date. That may not be art, but it is a beautiful thing.
Students, meet your match: How ScholarMatch made Airtable work for them, Part 2
This is the second of a two-part series on ScholarMatch. For more on ScholarMatch, and their use of Airtable for managing donations, see Part 1.
Getting with the program
The barriers faced by ScholarMatch's students aren't just financial. More often than not, aspiring college graduates from low-income backgrounds lack access to the counseling services necessary to get through the college admissions process successfully. How do you write a personal statement that'll impress an admissions committee? Ace the standardized tests? And if you get accepted, how do you navigate the labyrinthine systems of financial aid applications?
Volunteers help scholars refine their college application essays in one of ScholarMatch's after-school writing workshops.
Accordingly, ScholarMatch has expanded its scope in recent years to accommodate their students' needs for more programs providing test prep, career counseling, financial aid guidance, and writing workshops. Once they started offering workshops, they needed a way to schedule programs, manage and assign volunteers to run the programs, and log which students attended which programs.
Because Airtable is completely flexible, ScholarMatch has been able to adapt their database easily to match their changing workflow. ToĀ keep track of their scheduled programs, they just created a separate table within their existing database and used linkedĀ records to integrate the new table with the rest of the database.
A redacted table of programs. ScholarMatch uses a count field to see how many students have attended each program event.
You can count on Airtable
It's important for ScholarMatch to track which programs are popular among students. To aid in this, they have created a count field in the "Program Log" table to automatically add up the number of students who have attended each ScholarMatch program.
A count field works by counting the number of records in a linked record field. Their "Students Attended" count field looks at how many unique linked records are in the "Student Attendees" field, and returns that number.
ScholarMatch is on the case(notes)
ScholarMatch's assistance doesn't end once their students get accepted and go off to collegeāthe organization continues to provide its scholars with money and moral support all the way through graduation. From giving career advice and internship placement assistance, to sending care packages full of homemade cookies and San Francisco postcards, ScholarMatch does everything it can for its students to make sure they stay in school and thrive.
With ScholarMatch now serving hundreds of students, it's critically important to keep logs of their communications with every student. This way, they can ensure that all students are getting the attention they need and address each student's unique issues in future communicationsāin particular, they can keep a close eye on the students who might beĀ having difficulties at college or with their families.
To log their case management notes, ScholarMatch created yet another table in their database, which is linked to the student records. Using a similar method to the one used in the "Donations" table, each record in the communications log is given a unique code using a formula which concatenates the date of communication, the format of communication (whether it's an in-person meeting, a text, or an email), and the topic discussed.
New records can be created on Airtable's mobile apps, allowing volunteers and mentors to efficiently log case management notes on the go.
As ScholarMatch has grown larger and its ambitions greater, they've found more and more uses for their Airtable database. For event planning, they have a table for events linked to the contacts tab, which shows which donors and volunteers are attending. For career counseling, they have another table listing different career fields, which is linked to tables of relevant internships and companies, students who have expressed interest in those career fields, and volunteers or mentors who work in those career fields. They even have a table for keeping track of PR, which compiles articles on ScholarMatch and journalists' contact info.
All of the tables in ScholarMatch's Airtable database... for now.
The future of ScholarMatch
There's still plenty of work ahead for ScholarMatch, as long as Adamson has anything to say about it: "We have a big vision to scale our services to work beyond students in the Bay Area. We hope by next year to become a national organization." For now, though, ScholarMatch is still limited to its Bay Area office, and not all of the students who would like to use ScholarMatch's resources can make it to their office.
That's why ScholarMatch has moved toward putting more and more student resources online, such as information about scholarships, internships, enrichment programs, and college fly-in programs.Ā "Before Airtable," Adamson says, "we used to have to export the information as a PDF, and then upload it to the site, and then students would have to download it. It was hard to make changes, and cumbersome."" They've since switched toĀ making several tables from their Airtable database publicly available to students on their website as embeds.Ā "Now, they see a real-time, dynamic view, and as we update things on our end, it automatically updates the front end. The students really like it."
How an embedded table looks on ScholarMatch's website. Clicking on a record expands it, allowing you to pull up all the fields on a record in a convenient card view.
Show your work
After putting together databases of useful student resources, ScholarMatch wanted to be able to make those databases accessible to everyone. Airtable lets you embed your databases (or even just specific tables or views within those databases) on your websiteāthat way, anyone can see your hard work without getting an Airtable account.
To create a shared view link and embed it on your website, all you have to do is click the publish button and then check the box next to "Create a shareable grid view link."
This will bring up the option "Embed this view on your site," which, when clicked, will bring you to another screen where you can get an embed code and preview how it will look on your website.
The most ambitious of ScholarMatchās efforts to extend its reach, however, isĀ ScholarMatcher, an online tool designed to help students from low-income households find the right schools for their academic and financial profiles. ScholarMatcher, which is hosted and powered by Airtable, has even been recognized by the White House for its usefulness in getting information on schools' available financial aid, graduation rates, and post-graduation earnings to the students who need it most.
ScholarMatch's ScholarMatcher grades each school on a 4.0 scale in several different categories.
But the release of ScholarMatcher is just one expression of ScholarMatch's national ambitions. Much like how ScholarMatch's sister organization, 826 Valencia, started out as just a single location and soon grew to encompass a nationwide network of seven chapters under the name 826 National, ScholarMatch eventually hopes to expand its reach in order to make getting a college education possible for low-income students all across the country.
ScholarMatch's needs when it was just a fledgling crowdfunding platform and its present needs as an aspiring nationwide nonprofit are very differentābut they've been able to use Airtable the whole way through. Even as their organization has grown to serve hundreds rather than dozens of students, they've been able to build software that adapts with them. "The key to Airtable is the flexibility and simplicity. Usually, if you have a tool that's very flexible, it's also very complex, whereas if you have something that's very simple, it's not robust. Airtable has somehow managed to be both of those things," Adamson says. "That's very key for an organization which doesn't have the infrastructure or budget to implement techāwhich is most nonprofits."
Students, meet your match: How ScholarMatch made Airtable work for them, Part 1
The story in four sentences
Background: ScholarMatch, a small nonprofit serving underprivileged students by crowdfunding college scholarships, started using an Airtable database as an inexpensive and flexible software solution for managing donors and donations. As the organization grew larger, and broadened its mission to include comprehensive college counseling services, ScholarMatch was able to easily adapt its database to fit its changing needs.
How they're using Airtable: ScholarMatch keeps all the information related to their students, donors, donations, program schedules and attendance, volunteers, alumni, press mentions, and much, much more in a comprehensive database, which allows them to see quickly how these different categories are interconnected in meaningful ways.
Why it matters: Especially for a nonprofit without the budget to pay for an outside tech consultant to set up custom database software, Airtable provides a solution which is robust enough to handle complex problems and versatile enough to scale with a growing organization.
ScholarMatch's drop-in center, at 849 Valencia.
Dave Eggers has always been passionate about education. Though best known as the author of the widely acclaimed memoirĀ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he also founded the nonprofit 826 Valencia in 2002, which provides writing tutoring for underserved students. As part of its services, 826 Valencia offers six college scholarships every year. But soon, they had hundreds of students applying for these six slotsāit was heartbreaking to have to turn down hundreds of qualified candidates, each with their own compelling stories.
So in 2010, Eggers founded another nonprofitāScholarMatchādedicated to making scholarships possible for these driven but disadvantaged high schoolers. Kickstarter, launched the year prior, provided inspiration for ScholarMatch's model: each student's scholarship is crowdfunded by donors, and the donors receiveĀ a series of updates from the student, creating a tangible link between their support and a student's success. "We want our scholars to know that someone from their community supports them, and cares about them," says Diana Adamson, Executive Director of ScholarMatch.
In the beginning, ScholarMatch served 39 students, exclusively through its hands-off crowdfunding website. Today, ScholarMatch works with over 600 students per year, and provides active support and mentorshipĀ throughout the entire college application and enrollment process, all the way up to college graduation. From their drop-in center across the street from 826 Valencia, in San Franciscoās Mission District, they provide the financial aid, coaching, and career support needed to ensure a successful graduation.
Getting ScholarMatch to its current size was no easy feat, requiring not just determination, but organization. To manage a nonprofit with thousands of stakeholdersādonors, students, volunteers, colleges, and moreāScholarMatch needed a reliable platform that could easily house and cross-reference many different types of information. Traditional database systems were out of the question: in addition to being inflexible and costly, they required tens of thousands of dollars in implementation. "We didn't have the budget to pay for a tech person to come in and set up a system for us. We needed something that we could transform ourselves, and something that my staff could use without any computer programming expertise," Adamson says.
In their search for a tool that would be powerful enough to handle all of their information, intuitive enough for all of the staff to learn, and flexible enough to grow with them as an organization, Adamson came across Airtable. ScholarMatch initially started using Airtable in December 2013 to track their donors and donations. But as their organizational mission broadened in scope and they began to offer more services, their Airtable database grew with them.
Today, ScholarMatch uses a comprehensive Airtable database for many different purposes: storing records of their donors and donations; keeping demographic information about their students and their home lives; planning their college coaching programs; making lists of different colleges' fly-in events; tracking their mentions in the press, and more. And when itās time to apply for grants, all the numbers are in one place. "Airtable tracks everything," Adamson says. āItās the home of all our organizational info.ā
Adam Savage (Mythbusters) and Aisha Tyler (Archer, Whose Line Is It Anyway?), the emcees at ScholarMatch's "Definitely-Not-Trivial Trivia Night" in August 2011
Donations are fund-amental
When Adamson first arrived at ScholarMatch, all of the information on donors, students, and donations was scattered across a handful of messy, shared word docs. This was adequate when the number of students and donors was still very small. "But by year 2 or 3," she says, "it was beginning to be much more complex, and we needed a full CRM to get the full picture of what was going on with a student. What high school do they go to? What services do we provide them? Who has donated to their scholarship, and how much is their scholarship? We needed a dynamic system that could link those things together."
In a traditional spreadsheet program, cross-referencing data between sheets is a laborious and fragile process, and requires making manual updates in many different locations whenever any information is changed. In ScholarMatch's Airtable database, however, the table of donor records is linked to the table of donation records, which is then linked to a table of recipient student records, ensuring that any changes made to any of the tables causes the other tables to update in realtime.
ScholarMatch has integrated its Airtable database with Stripe so that whenever a new donation is added to the system, it is automatically inserted into Airtable. After the data from Stripe arrives in the database,Ā a formula in the first field of the donations table concatenates the date of the donation and the amount of the donation to create a code for each donation record.
A formula for success
When ScholarMatch uses Airtable to log every individual donation, or every instance that they interact with one of their students, each record of those events needs to have a unique, descriptive name. Unlike a table of contacts or a table of charitable organizations, in which the name of each record is fairly straightforward, it's not especially obvious how to assign brief and descriptive names to records of events. In these cases, it can be useful to set up a formula as the primary field.
For every row in ScholarMatch's donations table, the formula which generates the donation code works by looking at the values in the "Donation Date" column and the "Donation Amount" column and concatenating them by using ampersands, along with some static text. The formula also uses the DATETIME_FORMAT function to ensure that the values in the "Donation Date" field are appropriately displayed in the desired M/D/YYYY format.
When writing formulas in Airtable, you use the column names wrapped in curly brackets as variables instead of specified cell ranges, and the formula is automatically applied to each cell in a row. Ampersands or the CONCATENATE function can then be used to concatenate the values in each column with static values or other variables.
Then, ScholarMatch uses linked record fields to associate each donation with its appropriate donor and student. By selecting the name of the appropriate donor in the linked record type field "Donors," and selecting the name of the appropriate student in the linked record type field "Students," all three tables are linked togetherāmeaning that any changes made in one table will be reflected in all tables.
A (redacted) table of donations. Color-coded single select fields allow ScholarMatch to mark which donations were made using which payment methods, and to designate which donations are earmarked for what purposes.
The links created by the linked record field allow you to click on the name of a record from a different table and bring up all of that record's associated information. Linked record fields also enable ScholarMatch to use other powerful field types, such as lookup and rollup fields.
Things are looking up
Using linked records allows ScholarMatch to arrange data from other tables in useful ways. Since the "Donations" table is linked to the "Contacts" table, ScholarMatch can use another field, called a lookup field. A lookup field uses a linked record field to automatically pull values from one table into another table.
ScholarMatch sends out thank-you letters to their donors for every donation. Instead of clicking through each linked donor's individual record every time they need to get a donor's address, or going to the contacts table, they have created a lookup field which automatically populates with each donor's address in the donations table.
The configuration options for a lookup field.
To set up this lookup field, ScholarMatch selected a linked record field in the "Donations" table that is linked to the "Contacts" tableāin this case, the "Donor" field. Then after picking the "Donor" column, they selected the specific field they wished to look up from the target contacts table, the "Address" field.
Once configured, the lookup field brings up each donor's address by searching through the information in the contacts table. This way, it's easy to see each donor's address without ever leaving the donations table or expanding any records.
Let the good times roll(up)
ScholarMatch tracks the total amount of donations a donor has contributed over time by using a rollup field. Like a lookup field, a rollup field draws values from a linked table, but it can also perform calculations or formulas based on the linked records.
A (redacted) table of donors. In addition to using a rollup field to track each donor's total contributions to the organization over time, ScholarMatch also uses a rollup field to list all of the students that have been matched to each donor.
For donors who have given to the organization multiple times, it's important for ScholarMatch to track how much money they've contributed in total. Rather than going through each linked record separately and adding up all of the dollar amounts manually, ScholarMatch set up a rollup column that automatically sums up each donor's lifetime contributions.
The configuration options for a rollup field. Rollup fields can support many different kinds of aggregation functionsāmeaning that they can summarize or average lists of numbers, join values into a list, and more.
The "Total Donations" rollup field in ScholarMatch's "Contacts" table is connected to a linked record field linked to the "Donations" table. Then, the rollup field takes the values from the "Donation Amount" column in the "Donations" table that are associated with a particular donor and adds up of all of those values.
For more on ScholarMatch, including how they adapted their Airtable database to scale to their growing organization, continue on to Part 2.
How Yext stays ahead of the competition with Airtable
When Howard Lerman founded Yext in 2006, his goal was simple: ābuild an impactful, great company with super talented people.ā That mission has fueled the company for ten years, from its early days offering lead generation for local businesses, through its pay-per-call technology, which it spun off under the name Felix and sold to IAC, to its present-day status as the leading provider of location data management services to businesses of all sizes worldwide.
Marketers can make updates in real-time across the web at just the click of a button.
Location data management is a crucial operational concern for all businesses with brick and mortar locations. For companies like Sunglass Hut, which count on their physical stores to drive 95% of sales, keeping location information up-to-date across the far-flung reaches of the Internet is essential. Yet changing opening hours or a locationās address necessitates many dreaded hours of manually scouring the web to find and update every directory listing, and then waiting days, weeks, and sometimes even months for the updates to appear. Yext provides a single, authoritative dashboard to discover, monitor, and control these listings in real-time a across over a hundred sites, including Google, Apple, Bing, Facebook, Yahoo, Yelp, and more. As a result, the Yext Location Management Platform is able to streamline the excruciating process of updating every possible listing to just a single click of a button.
Lerman's focus on the people behind the business has its benefitsāthey just keep coming back. Take head of product Jonathan Kennell: this isnāt his first time at Yext. He originally joined the company in 2010 as a Software Engineer. Yet after rising through the company to become a Director of Product Management, Kennell made the decision to start his own company in 2012. His companyās product, Reschedge, helped to streamline the recruiting interview scheduling process by using intelligent coordination across schedules, priorities, and interview sequences. A few years later, he sold Reschedge to HireVue, a larger recruiting software company, and subsequently returned to Yext as VP of Product Management.
In the intervening years, Yext continued to rapidly accelerate its businessāthe company grew to a team of 400 employees worldwide, managing over half a million business locations for everyone from mom-and-pop small businesses to Fortune 500 retailers and large hotel chains. It was also named one of Forbesā Most Promising Companies, one of Fortuneās Great Places to Work for the past two years in a row, and grabbed the #212 spot on Inc. 500ās 2015 list of Fastest Growing Private Companies in America.
The software tools it takes to grow a business
Having just returned from an early-stage startup, Kennell brings a unique perspective to his role as a leader at the company. Heās constantly thinking about what tools it takes to grow a businessāwhether theyāre just getting started or, like Yext, are still expanding rapidly after 10 years on the market.
āThe philosophy of your business and how you actually model that in processes and technology is always changing,ā said Kennell. āYou canāt just set your systems up once and assume theyāll still work yearsāor even monthsālater.ā
The need for a way to flexibly model the rapidly changing processes and organization of the growing company led Kennell to Airtable.
Airtable for competitive analysis
A key piece of the growth puzzle is keeping an eye on any upstart competitors coming for a slice of the market. Although Yextās comprehensive product suite and proprietary integrations with sites like Google and Apple clearly differentiate its solution from other competitors, more and more companies are starting to recognize the value of maintaining a consistent brand across platforms and locations and are attempting to enter the lucrative market. In response, Kennell and team set out to build a comprehensive competitive database in Airtable.
The first step was to identify and track comparable features offered by their competitors. With a color-coded multiple select field in their base, they standardized and assigned those features to the appropriate competitors for easy comparison.
The Yext competitor analysis base.
Not only does this data allow them to keep tabs on their competition, but it helps to inform their marketing and product development as well. Designers and writers alike can turn to the base to research the solutions others have developed, and determine the best ways to both serve their customers and stand out from the rest of the pack.
The Yext team hard at work.
Staying abreast of the competitor conversation
To get a better sense of the broader market landscape, they keep a detailed list of specific incidents involving the competition. āWe have one table that lists all the companies, and then another table that has individual āincidents' where that company came up,ā says Kennell. āFor example, perhaps a customer mentioned them, or they were in the press.ā
Jonathan Kennell, VP of Product Management at Yext.
If a company similar to Yext is featured in Wired, for example, the headline is added to this separate āIncidentsā table. The team can upload the companyās logo and a screenshot of the article as attachments, and include the URL to the article. The incident is then linked to the specific competitor in the āCompaniesā table for easy reference in the future.
Not their actual competitors.
With this base, team members from throughout the company are able to quickly summon the context they need to make informed decisions. If a customer or prospect mentions a competitor, their salesperson is able to look up the customerās previous mentions of that competitor, not to mention the places where its comparable features fall short. Similarly, the communications team can determine how competitors have been positioned with different members of the press, helping to make sure they can properly differentiate themselves in subsequent conversations.
A database that grows with your team
With their competitive database up and running, Kennell and the team at Yext are already moving on to other uses for Airtable, this time to streamline the product development process.
āThe value of Airtable is that it allows you to jumpstart the process of building software,ā says Kennell. āYou can essentially create whatever enterprise software you want. It makes it easier for everyone to be a programmer.ā
We're delighted to welcome Jonathan as the newest member of the Airtable team, where he's joining us as a marketing manager. Previously, Jonathan led product marketing at Sift Science and worked as a consultant to Fortune 500 companies in the TMT (technology, media, and media) sectors at Altman Vilandrie & Company. In his spare time, Jonathan enjoys hiking, testing out new recipes in the kitchen, and exploring the hidden gems of San Francisco.
Previously a self-proclaimed spreadsheet power user, Jonathan discovered the power and flexibility of databases, and he hasn't looked back since. Jonathan loves to organize anything and everything that he can (Post-It Notes and bulleted lists are practically family), and he considers Airtable the Swiss Army knife of organization that he didn't realize he'd been missing. Jonathan uses Airtable to organize more parts of his life than he'd like to admit publicly ā from planning out all of the episodes of America's Next Top Model that he needs to re-watch with his boyfriend to mapping out all of the countries that he wants to visit someday.
Today we released some improvements to our API designed to improve the way you can list and select records.
With these new parameters, you can filter, sort and otherwise limit the number of records returned in a more precise way.
Letās take a look at how they work!
New Parameters in Action
One key result of the API updates is the replacement of the list function in the Airtable Javascript library with a new function: select. (If you have already built applications using list, fear notā it will still work. You should probably switch over, though, because select is pretty great.)
For those of you not using the Javascript library, worry not: the API endpoint for reading records remains in the same place, but it now supports the new parameters.
In all of the examples below, weāll show you how to use the select function to achieve better performance and more precise results.
Filter by formula
Where previously you would have needed to download the full list of records in a table, you can now use a formulaic expression with our filterByFormula option to return only records which pass this ad-hoc filter condition. This should be much faster (and more efficient, to boot!)
filterByFormula in action. Here, weāre choosing all the cities we visited for more than 5 days from the āCitiesā table. You can use any formula that the Airtable formula field type supports as a filter.
Sort by multiple fields
For those cases when you want to receive records in a specific order based on certain fields, you can now programmatically sort by multiple fields.
Here, weāre sorting the cities in our base, first by their country in ascending order, and second by the number of days we spent in them, in descending order.
Limit maximum number of records
If you have a base with a large number of records, but only want to receive a certain number of records at a time, you can use maxRecords to set a specific limit on the number of records returned.
This function identifies the table view that the records will come from. Each table view is like a lens onto the same underlying table, but each may have its own row ordering and row filters applied. You can use views that you create using Airtableās website or app; weāre using the āCities to Visitā view that we already set up. This then limits the total number of returned records to the first 5 (our top picks.) Better not to get too overwhelmed by all the possibilities.
Limit the fields returned
By using the fields parameter, you can choose exactly which fields you want to receive, rather than receiving all of them for every record. This makes it much easier to cut down the noise and isolate exactly the information youāre looking for from a specific record.
In this snippet, we only want to receive the name of the city and whether it has been visited, so we use the fields parameter to specify that we want only the contents of those exact fields.
So there you have it! Have any other features youād like to see in the API? Let us know here.
In her spare time, Kat is an avid knitter and a huge nerd for strategy games. Sheās excited to use Airtable to make even more databases for herself, whether itās a simple database for tracking her knitting projects, or a massively complicated database compiling statistics for all of the 450+ contestants who have been on the game show Survivor.
Update: Airtable is officially a featured productivity app in the App Store for both iPhone and iPad!
Today, we introduce our new iPad app. Itās only been a few weeks since we launched our redesigned iPhone application (check it out!) but this is something different: an entirely new way of organizing and interacting with the information that matters most to you.
One of our goals with Airtable is to put the database to work for absolutely everyoneāregardless of their technical background. On desktop, that means capturing the flexibility and simplicity of the spreadsheet while also delivering the power of real database structure, empowering absolutely anyone to organize things the way they want.
But there are some things the iPad just does better than the desktop. It has the portability of the iPhone but the power of the desktop. You can multitask without sacrificing the intimacy and intuitiveness of the touch interface. Itās free from distraction and encourages focus. It makes browsing content feel magical.
And, of course, you can create content on iPad, too. But sometimes, what you need is a blank canvas for structured data. Like a spreadsheet, but better ā designed from the ground up for a touch screen, and with an organizational, rather than number-crunching, mentality.
Enter the Airtable iPad app.
As flexible as a spreadsheet. Built for the iPad.
Much like the iPhone app, the iPad app database displays records as a series of cards (much more tap-friendly than narrow spreadsheet gridlines stretching to infinity). But additional screen real estate means we can take it even farther, by allowing you to expand, read, and edit records while still preserving the context of the list.
We designed the iPad app to fluidly adapt to any iPad size variant (from the mini to the Pro), and any permutation of split screen modes ā landscape + portrait slide over, landscape + portrait 50/50 split view, landscape 40/60 and 60/40 split view, etc.
For instance, if youāre searching for a new apartment, you can keep each listing in view while capturing the most pertinent details to inform your search. Because the full record list is still visible, you can quickly compare crucial details like rent and location to other apartments already under consideration.
Turning Data into Action
Once youāve narrowed your list down, you can filter by district and open house hours to identify all listings you could visit in a single trip.
From there, you can simply slide open Maps to grab directions to the first listing and youāll be on your way!
Now, whether youāre planning your volunteering schedule, following up with a client about their furniture order, or even trying to choose screenshots for a blog post, you can keep every detail you need to get things done right at your fingertips.
Multitasking in action.
But donāt take our word for itā¦ try it out for yourself! With dozens of templates to get you started, ranging from planning out a novel-writing project, to organizing cattle and farm equipment, weāre sure youāll find a great use case (or a hundred) for the Airtable iPad app. Good news for you ā itās now available in the App Store!
Itās 1948 and Norman Joseph Woodland has a problem. A graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology, heās supposed to be teachingā but he canāt stop thinking about a simple problem: how to automatically distinguish between products at checkout. After a few false starts involving ink that glows under UV light, he quits his job and cashes out of the stock market to pursue his ideas. Soon, with a novel combination of existing technologies including Morse Code and a 1920s-era system for playing movie soundtracks, heās able to create (and interpret) the first linear barcode. Itās too expensive, and the lightbulb necessary to help read the barcode is so hot and bright it could cause eye damage, but it works.
Norman Joseph Woodland with one of the images from his original patent application.
1961
A little over a decade (and many patents) later, David J Collins applies a similar principle to help railroads automatically identify rail cars as they enter the yard. By shining beams of colored light at patterns of reflective orange and blue stripes on the sides of the cars, and using a primitive new computer to interpret the reflections, heās able to create a system that leads to the adoption of a nationwide railroad coding system. Excited by the future prospects of this technology, he asks his company to fund future explorations āand gets shut down. So he creates his own company, Computer Identics Corporation, which pushes barcode technology into industry by leveraging newly-cost-effective laser technology and introducing barcode systems into manufacturing and distribution centers.
āKarTrak codeā photo by Quinn Rossi Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons.
1974
After urgent pleas for barcode development from the grocery industry lead to the development of many competing proposals (including everything from bullseyes to starbursts), IBM realizes they have the original inventor of the barcode ā Woodland, whose patent has run out ā on staff, and with his help develop the now-ubiquitous UPC. The first UPC to be scanned in a store, on a pack of Wrigley Company chewing gum, is the beginning of an era of transformation for industries the world over.
1994
Fed up with the fact that one-dimensional barcodes like the UPC can only contain 20 alphanumeric characters, a Toyota subsidiary called Denso Wave invents the QR, or āQuick Response,ā code in order to contain more (and more diverse) data. With a team of only two developers, the team creates the new two-dimensional system, which focuses on supporting rapid scanning, and chooses not to exercise its patent rights in order to encourage widespread use of the standard.
Today
Everyone from marketers to scientists use barcodes to streamline processes, access information, and more. And Airtable has released barcodes as a new field type, so you too can benefit from their power. Your organizational life might never be the same.
Want to see them in action? Check out our handy guide to using Airtable and barcodes for asset tracking!
Ah, barcodes. From their humble roots in morse code and 1920s movie sounds systems (really) to their present ubiquity in stores, railroads, factories, and biomes everywhere, these funny little collections of lines help to organize and streamline processes the world round. As you can imagine, weāre rather fond of them.
So in our iOS 2.1.0 release, we added barcodes to the field type family! Now you can scan a barcode to record its value in a base, or search for a record by scanning the barcode with your mobile device.
What's in a barcode?
If youāve never spent time scrutinizing the labels on the products you purchased, hereās something you might not know: there are over a dozen major one-dimensional and two-dimensional barcode types.
The most common types of barcodes fall into the one-dimensional category: they represent data by the relative thickness and thinness of their lines. UPC barcodes, the type used in a grocery-story checkout line, use this method to encode 12 numerical digits.
2D barcode types, on the other hand, are able to represent much more data per unit area, including support for multiple types of data ranging from alphanumeric strings to binary code or Kanji. The most famous example is the QR Code.
We currently support 16 types of barcodes. Check out the full list here.
But enough background on barcodes: letās talk about how they can be helpful. To illustrate just how useful this can be, we thought weād give you an inside look at how Airtable uses barcodes to track assets.
All your device are belong to us
As a growing startup, Airtable has no shortage of electronics to track: from the laptop, monitor and other peripherals assigned to each new Airtabler to the truly shocking number of test devices on hand at any given time, thereās more than a few items for the team to keep an eye on.
Prior to the introduction of barcodes, we had a big asset tracking base for all of this:
The original Airtable asset tracking base.
This base helped to create a unified view of all important information about each device in use at Airtable, from device type and operating system version to serial number, owner, photo, and more.
That said, there was one notable frustration: in particular, because many of the items look alike, to find the right one required manually searching for its serial number. This happened every time a device changed handsāa huge waste of time.
Barcodes to the rescue
First Doug, an engineer on the team (and asset tracking enthusiast) bought a package of barcodes and got to work giving every single Airtable device a unique tag.
Airtable engineer Doug adds barcodes to everything.
He also added a new āAsset Tagā barcode field to our Asset Tracker base. In the Airtable iPhone app, he opened the record for each device and tapped the āscan barcodeā option by the āAsset Tagā field.
Pretty straightforward.
The new Airtable asset tracking base.
The new barcode field type makes finding and updating the right asset records much faster. Now, when a person checks out a device from the device library, they simply search with a scan of the deviceās affixed barcode. The record for that device appears, and they can update the āIn possession ofā field to reflect the current status of the device.
Itās much easier to keep all of the records up-to-date, so we can always find the device we need, when we need it.
Other ways to use barcodes
Weāve heard from our users that barcodes can be particularly useful for everything from lending libraries to equipment checkout. Now itās your turn: how do you plan to use barcodes? Share your use case or give us some feedback here.
Powering Legislative Advocacy Using Airtable: Andrew Cates
Shaking up systems and battling bureaucracy is the job description for Andrew Cates, General Counsel and Director of Government Affairs for the Texas Nurses Association. The TNA, founded in 1907 and located in Austin, is a statewide, professional association of licensed nurses. And every day, Cates fights to protect the workers' rights of 250,000 nurses in the Lone Star State.
Nurses face exposure to germs, needlesāand patients with varying levels of distressāon a daily basis. Up until September 2015, Texas nurses who got hurt on the job in certain hospitals had limited recourse.
Why not?
It all traces back to an ambiguously-worded Texas law. The Medical Malpractice and Tort Reform Act of 2003 lumped these nursesā claims against their hospital employers into the same category as medical malpractice lawsuits.
When Cates joined TNA in March 2015, challenging this law was one of the first issues he tackled. With his help, the TNA was able to help pass a bill that allows nurses to seek compensation when injured on the job.
Catesās days are a blur of activity. At the Texas State Capitol, Cates hops from one meeting to another with key legislators to advocate for the protection of nurses in their work environment.
Pictured here (from left): Executive Director Cindy Zolnierek, RN, PhD; Chair Jeff Watson, MSN, RN, NE-BC, CRRN; and General Counsel and Director of Governmental Affairs Andrew Cates.
The Software Tools for Advocacy
Initially, Cates used Excel to create contact lists. āI fell into the processes that were already in place. It was an all-Windows office,ā says Cates. āIām a lawyer. Iām not a technical person. I never used Excel to crunch data, but itās still the main, albeit antiquated, way that people in my industry organize contacts.ā
After he discovered Airtable, he was able to do much more than just store a simple text list of names. In Airtable, he keeps a highly visual record for each legislator, replete with profile photos to help remember faces, color-coded political affiliations, house or senate districts (with maps of exact district boundaries), and notes. He then uses Airtableās relational functionality to link each legislator to the nursing-related congressional committees to which they belong. He also created a separate linked table to list each congresspersonās chief of staff, along with their contact information.
The Airtable database used by Cates to organize his political relationships
āItās great to go into a meeting with elected officials and have tons of information about them in my phone,ā Cates says. āI donāt have to rely on printed information and endless lists of peopleāitās all integrated in one place. This base keeps me from having nine different contact lists.ā
Cates appreciates that he can use Airtable on any platform. āThe fact that it isnāt tied to an OS or an Office suite helps tremendously, now that I have a MacBook at home,ā he says. āNo formatting issues anymore!ā
Teamwork at TNA
Airtable has become much more than a solo tool for Andrew. He loops in other team members at TNA to share their collective knowledge around issues and legislators.
āNot only is Airtable easy to share, but people on my team can add their comments.ā
Cates also wants to bring Airtable to the entire nursing community at largeā all 250,000 nurses. Heās experimenting with the best way to embed a public Airtable Form to allow association members to contribute ideas and feedback about the policy issues most important to them.
Beyond the Capitol
Catesās passion for advocacy extends beyond his day job. He recently self-published a book entitled Texas Ethics Laws. Intended for attorneys, candidates, consultants, and legislative staff, it offers a one-stop-shop guide to navigating the waters of the Texas Ethics Commissionās laws on campaign finance and lobbying.
When Cates needed to organize customer pre-sales, shipments, and inventory, he knew Airtable would be the easiest way to organize it all. It lets him keep tabs on what books have shippedāand how many copies still need to be ordered. āPreviously, I used Google Drive, and I find Airtable a lot easier,ā reports Cates. āThe checkbox feature makes it easy to see whether or not a book has shipped.ā
Whether heās advocating for nurses, editing books, or creating a customized database, Cates believes in confronting the status quo and exploring new ways of doing things.
Shaking up the political world takes time ā but Cates knows that the end results are worth it. And Airtable is the tool he counts on to help him accomplish his goals.
Check out Andrew Catesās Political Contacts Management template here.
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