"Success & Barriers in Adopting Airtable for Project Management of Events & Education Programs"

Submitted

5.0
5.0
Overall User Rating

Product(s): Airtable

Overall Comment:"Robust platform with many use cases, responsive to user inquiries and support needs, great resources to help with learning new workflows or scaling, integrates easily with other workflows and services, decent AI assistant and capabilities. Trigger actions are great, and I love the surveys and interfaces. Additional display options would be nice, like greater flexibility in building schedules in a view rather than creating an interface. "

Lessons Learned

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What do you like most about the product or service?

Airtable is extremely adaptable for different uses, and the basics are simple to understand. I especially like the user forums and shared templates. When there is a function I need that Airtable can't do, or that is locked behind a higher tier, there is usually a decent workaround or another free product/service that can be integrated. Love being able to copy/paste data in and out of Airtable. Great support team, and I appreciate the NPO discount!

Description
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What do you dislike most about the product or service?

1 - The billing levels and account types are confusing and don't seem to match expanding user needs - for example, many of my professional contacts in event management and education now use Airtable (managing conventions, retreats, certification programs, etc.) but it's prohibitively expensive to add more members of the project team for access to the few features they'd use like updating extant records from a survey, automating messages and updating timelines and assignments, commenting/reviewing records, or sharing interfaces. How I use it, paying by user access and desired functions (interfaces, surveys, commenting/marking items complete) doesn't make sense; billing based on storage space or number of 'active' bases would be better. 2 - Exporting multiple files is a terrible experience, requiring all the files to be individually re-named. Fine for one or two, but bulk downloads quickly become burdensome. 3 - The learning curve from Excel to Airtable is comparatively high. Though we don't seem to be the typical client in how we use it, it would be nice to have simple workflow examples and how-to guides for project managers and less tech-savvy team members. 4 - Interfaces have so much potential to act as mini storefronts, provide data collection, personalize the end-user experience, and share information internally and externally. They are functionally hobbled by the most useful features being locked to higher tiers since we can't justify moving to the Enterprise level. Being able to allow "customers" (Board/committee members, staff on other teams) to use an interface like a website guest without a paid account would revolutionize my life. Truly, interfaces and surveys to collect/update/display data set Airtable apart from many other similar data management tools.

Evaluation & Contracting

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Why did you purchase this product or service?

  • Improve business process agility
  • Improve customer relations/service
  • Create internal/operational efficiencies
  • Drive innovation
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What were the key factors that drove your decision?

  • Strong user community
  • Overall cost
  • Product functionality and performance
  • Breadth of services
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Which other vendors did you consider in your evaluation?

  • monday.com
  • Other...
  • Microsoft
  • Smartsheet
Description
SparkAI, Google, Podia, OpenLMS, Oxford Abstracts

Integration & Deployment

5.0

Service & Support

5.0

Product Capabilities

5.0

Additional Context

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Deployment architecture

Cloud (SaaS or PaaS or IaaS)
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In which country(s) did your deployment take place?

United States