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H! I’d like to use AirTable to help prioritize a set of ~50 project ideas, soliciting input from 10-15 stakeholders.

I’d like to let users rank the projects in terms of Customer Value and Strategic Alignment (fit to our organization) using a simple semantic scale (very low, low, medium, high, very high).

A very efficient way to do this is through Airtable’s Kanban views, where they can drag each idea into a column representing that attribute, going once through the list for Customer Value, and again for Strategic Alignment.

I’ve looked at examples of how to do group voting in AirTable through the templates and discussions in this forum, but they all seem to suggest using forms to capture input, sometimes one candidate at a time. This would require voters to open and submit 50 different form submissions.

Is there a way to provide each voter their own Kanban view of the projects that allow them to drag projects around and have those actions save out voter-specific Customer Value and Strategic Alignment rankings?

Hm, yeah you could potentially do that.  You’d need to have one idea record per stakeholder, and so you’d have ~50 project ideas x 10-15 stakeholders, so 500-750 records

Each of the idea records would have the stakeholder’s email, and you could use an Interface with a Kanban view that’s filtered on the logged in user’s email to let them see only their idea records, that way they won’t mess with each other's votes

This does mean that you’ll have to pay for 10-15 seats tho

Thanks ​@TheTimeSavingCo. Assuming for the moment that everyone has AirTable seats, won’t this essentially clone all of the records describing the ideas themselves? That sounds like a maintenance nightmare if you update/change something in one of those ideas.

I was hoping there was a way to mirror or shadow the idea records in another table somehow. Or some robust way to maintain identical contents to the idea record fields off of some sort of “master record”

I was hoping there was a way to mirror or shadow the idea records in another table somehow. Or some robust way to maintain identical contents to the idea record fields off of some sort of “master record”

Yeah thats doable, you’d have an ‘Ideas’ table with the 50 records and all their data, and then each of the 500-750 Idea <> Stakeholder records would be linked to the appropriate ‘Idea’ record and have the data show up in that table via lookups.  That way any changes made to an Idea record will show up automatically in the Idea <> Stakeholder records

This does mean that you could end up with a weird situation of:

  1. Stakeholder A ranks Idea 1
  2. Idea 1 data changes
  3. Stakeholder A’s ranking of Idea 1 persists, even though they may not agree to this ranking with the new data

And so you may have to create an alert system to ask people to re-rank things?

Hey ​@Felciano,

Adam’s suggested architecture above would be great. This is a super fun use case by the way.
For further context, you would have:

Ideas table
Users table (highly suggested)
Votes table (one record per idea per user/stakeholder)  

The votes table is what you would call a junction table (you can watch this YouTube video for a better understanding of junction tables).

You will want to filter the kanban by setting it to User (lookup from the User field from the User/Stakeholders table) has any of (or is exactly) Current User.

 


For last, you could show two buttons on the kanban itself a Green one upvote, a Red one to downvote. These would be Update record buttons. Or you could set buttons with dynamic urls on the database itself which hold webhooks for more robust automations (example of the latter on screenshot below)

 


Feel free to grab a slot using this link if you need any help setting this up! I’d be happy to show you around.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation
 

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