Event Recap: Build your Fundraising Base in Airtable | May 29

What a way to kick off the very first Nonprofits Crew event! Thank you so much to everyone who joined us, and to Pello and Jess for keeping the chat absolutely packed with helpful answers.

The recording is below.

Whether you attended live or are catching up now, keep reading for a full recap and chat roundup!

Only 19-23% of donors make a second gift, which means relationship-building isn't a nice-to-have, it's the backbone of long-term nonprofit sustainability. Airtable can help you build those meaningful connections with your donors. Thus, we used the example of an animal rescue donor management scenario. We covered:

• Building your Airtable architecture Before you build, think like an architect. We walked through how to structure your base around contacts, donations, interactions, and grants, and link them so you get a full picture of every donor's engagement history in one place.
• AI and Omni in action We used Omni to build out interfaces live, including a donor explorer and a donation reporting dashboard, showing just how fast you can go from zero to something beautiful and functional.
• Automations We built an automation together and walked through how you can set up triggers (like a donation coming in) to kick off personalized thank-you emails without any manual effort.
• What's possible beyond donor tracking From volunteer management to grant tracking, budgeting, and marketing, we closed with a look at how far you can take Airtable once the foundation is in place.

Chat Roundup
Maddie, our awesome community manager, also shared that the chat was one of the most active Airtable has ever seen (HOORAY)! Here are some highlights worth surfacing:

• "Can I upload my existing spreadsheets?" Yes! Airtable maps columns to fields automatically. Keep your headers consistent across files and everything lands cleanly in one table.
• "Does updating a record on an interface update it everywhere?" Yes, linked fields always reflect the source data. For copying values across tables, a background automation handles that.
• "Can I build a progress-to-goal widget?" Yes. Use a Number element on your interface tied to a rollup of total donations, then compare it against a goal field. Pello also noted this will be covered in depth at the June 24 event.
• "What can automations actually do?" A lot: create, update, find, and sort records, send emails, post to Slack or Teams, and more.
• Bonus: "What dog did you adopt?" - I adopted a Samoyed named Ellie 6 months ago!

Use cases people shared
We also loved that many people shared their own special nonprofit use cases:

• Running $1M+ in recovery residence funding entirely through Airtable
• Tracking volunteers, safety training, and check-in/check-out
• Managing grants alongside donor data
• Syncing intake data from Tally into Airtable interfaces

Resources:
Meeting recording
Link to the slides
Link to the Airtable base
Airtable Academy
Free Airtable Course

If you're not already in the group, join the Nonprofits Crew here and introduce yourself! Next event is June 24 with Pello from Moonland. We'll share the registration page soon!

PS - Because we mentioned the rescue during the webinar, I sent my local animal rescue (where Ellie came from) an $100 donation and made our fake Airtable record a reality! Looking forward to learning and building together with this community.