What problems is Airtable solving and how is that benefiting you?
I have several major projects in my role at a large research university, and all of them benefit from Airtable:
1. I coordinate a 10-year old fellowship program, and I have a decade of records and information about the program, its applicants and members, their work within the program, and their impacts on our community after they complete it. With Airtable I'm able to track all of that in one place, which means I always know where to go to find what I need, and it also means that I can create reports/interfaces for the fellows that give them snapshots of their particpation in the program over time. Since some of the folks have been involved for literally a decade they have had lots of engagement with many roles in the program, and before we moved all of this data to airtable I would have to recall things from memory or look each type of role up by person and year in our cloud storage. This has made the process easier, more accurate, and more helpful for the fellows themselves.
2. I organize several large-scale, complex events and programs for faculty, and using Airtable has made that process so much easier. I can have everything from project/task management to sign-ups and attendance lists to logistics planning all in one place, and because of the ease of synching and tables and linking fields, I can do virtually no copying and pasting throughout that process. I used to have so many spreadsheets for each event, and have to transfer so much information from one to another each time...and now that isn't a problem anymore. I can also use the same base each year and just update the years on the new records, so that I can more easily track data over time and have far more useful assessments of my programs. This has transformed my assessment processes and I'm really excited to see how that continues to grow.
3. We are implementing Airtable in our center's annual planning processes for the first time this year, and we've already benefitted so much. We are able to collect information more easily from each of our staff members about their plans and needs, and then the appropriate teams are able to easily gather their own annual lists of work from that collection more accurately than before. We're just starting to play around with automations to make this process even more streamlined and seamless, and I know by next summer's annual planning we'll have something even better put into place. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
