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We are a marketing agency that manages social media calendars for many clients. We love the platform for building the calendars and sharing amongst our team BUT sharing the calendars to the clients for approval is an actual nightmare that I can't solve. 

1. We have too many clients to add them as paid collaborators and not be super cost prohibitive

2. They can comment but would love for them to just be able to use the direct toggle to click approved to streamline.

How are you delivering your social media calendars to your clients? 

Hey ​@jmlsm,

Could you share public views with them, each view filtered for their own records?

Forthermore, you could have a url to a Fillout update record form, where the client will be able to update the record from Pending to Approved for example.

Would this be enough? 

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation


I’m not sure I understand how the fillout form would work? 

We need them to be able to mark if a post if approved, or requires edits. 


Yes, that is very easy to solve without turning your clients into paid collaborators on your base.

There are 4 different ways to allow external collaborators to edit records in your Airtable base — such as marking an event as “approved”.

Two of these ways cost money, and two of these ways are free:

  1. (PAID) Use Airtable’s portals, which costs $120 per month for 15 users, and $8 per month for each additional customer after that.
     
  2. (PAID)  Use a 3rd-party portal, which are typically less expensive than Airtable’s portals.

    The most popular portals that are currently available for Airtable are:
    NolocoJetAdminSoftrPory, and Glide.

    I gave an entire one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.
     
  3. (FREE) External read-only users can edit your Airtable records for free by using Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

    Fillout is 100% free, and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form.

    Fillout gives you a formula that you add to your Airtable base, which automatically creates a special URL for each record.

    You clients would then click on the URL (or a button) in your shared view or shared interface. (You could even make them read-only users in Airtable as well, because read-only users are free. But that isn’t necessary.)

    So they would click on the the URL (or button) while looking at the record, which would take them to that record in Fillout, and they can approve the record there. For any other fields that you don’t want them to edit, you would just add them to your form in a read-only state.

    I demonstrate how to do some of this on this Airtable podcast episode:
    Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
     
  4. (FREE) External read-only users can edit your Airtable records for free by triggering a custom webhook in Make, which would then automatically run an automation that marks that task as complete.

    Same setup as #3 above. You would create a formula in your Airtable base, which would automatically create a unique webhook URL for each record.

    Then, your read-only user would click on the URL (or button) while looking at the record in Airtable, which would then trigger the automation to mark the record as approved.

    I demonstrate how to setup these custom webhooks for approvals in this Airtable podcast episode. I specifically talk about approving records in Airtable in this video.

    Note that my podcast episode demonstrate this in the context of putting the custom webhook URL inside of an email, but you can skip the emailing step.

    If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget for your project, and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld


I’m not sure I understand how the fillout form would work? 

We need them to be able to mark if a post if approved, or requires edits. 



Hey ​@jmlsm you can check out Scott’s answer above for a more detailed version of what I meant :D

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation