What’s the messiest process at your nonprofit right now?

Hey Pello!

Airtable is currently only a departmental tool, sadly, so I’ve got a lot on my list that would match your description. 😅 For my team, though, yearly budgeting is one of those headaches that refuses to quit. 

One of the Airtable processes that continues to give me headaches, though, relates to our artifact swaps. We’ve gotten good at defining that process and have made templates to be able to do so (except for those ad-hoc projects that come out of left field), but I’m currently the only person that can really make these different projects + tasks because it’s just… fiddly. It would be easier if we had a Business plan instead of a Team plan (I think), but 95% of the time we don’t need that tier of capability. 

Honestly, as long as I’m here, my team is just fine. It’s just an issue when I want to pass off tasks to other team members that it becomes a struggle. 😅

How about you? Where are your sticking points?

​@Chris_Moore 

That “held together by the one person who understands the system” situation feels VERY familiar 😅

I’ve actually seen that happen quite a bit with Airtable. A team starts solving real problems quickly, which is great, but over time the setup becomes increasingly dependent on the people who originally built it. Especially once automations, linked records, templates, and edge cases start piling up.

So the challenge stops being “does the workflow work?” and becomes more:
“can other people realistically maintain and evolve this without breaking things?” 😅

When you say the artifact swap setup is fiddly:
is it mostly because of permissions/interface limitations on the Team plan, or more because the workflows themselves have become pretty layered over time?

And with budgeting, is the hardest part collaboration, approvals, versioning, reporting… or just trying to centralize everything in one place?

Back when I was at the Red Cross, one recurring challenge was connecting programmatic/impact data with operational + financial reporting without creating a ton of manual work downstream. I still hear variations of that problem pretty often from nonprofit teams.

​@Pello 

I sometimes daydream about a workplace with a common project management tool with enough admin support that department members don’t have to be IT professionals as a side hobby. 😅 It’s awesome being good with the templates, automations, and linked records, but it can be a bit much to manage at times. And exactly - I don’t really want people to break things and my team is very cautious because I’m the only one that understands all of the backend and no one wants to learn the intricacies.

And oof - I’m trying to describe the central issue I’m dealing with but struggling because there’s quite a few, so here’s what I’m trying to solve for: 1 swap takes approximately 3 months, involves engagement from approximately 10 people, and has around 12 steps/tasks to complete. We do around 30 swaps a year. 

Worse yet - my team started viewing projects in a Kanban view and now that’s how they want to see things. You might be thinking “oh, like a normal Kanban where the status is at the top?” Oh no, dear reader. They want each “bucket” to be its own project with the project tasks under it. Y’know, taking out the functionality of Kanban and instead making it a copy/paste nightmare for the admin. 😅😭

And also, I have someone that would be great at taking over this process because she’s the source of information on install dates, but for some reason she can’t apply the task templates to projects. For some reason she doesn’t have permissions to apply some of the templates even though I never changed permissions and I can’t find any reason why she wouldn’t have them.

So… I’ve got a bit of a rat’s nest that I’m needing to detangle but also a full-time job running the swaps as well as 4-8 new exhibitions (1-3 year lead time, hundreds of tasks each), assistance with 4 traveling exhibitions, and of course the ad-hoc projects. All of these in different phases of development at any given time, so it’s easier to keep using my admin tricks instead of redoing the entire swaps base to make it functional for someone else because who actually has free time in a nonprofit?? 

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Oof ​@Chris_Moore I definitely feel you. I left my museum role with a bunch of systems in place two years ago, and from what I’ve heard some of them are still running while others have broken down since (specifically the zip code tracking solution I built connecting Shopify PoS to Airtable).

On your colleague’s inability to apply task templates, could it be that she has editor permissions but needs creator permissions (or is permissioned at the base level and not the workspace level?)

Also on your Kanban nightmare board, it sounds like the actual interface you need is the Product Roadmap interface that is gated to Business/Enterprise tiers. I haven’t had the chance to play with it (I’m on Teams too) but per the interface description…

Roadmaps work like two-dimensional kanban boards: in addition to the typical “columns”, roadmaps also have “rows” corresponding to groups as they typically appear in Airtable. This view type has a large emphasis on density to help with high-level use cases such as roadmap planning. You can drag items across rows and columns as you update your plans and priorities.

​@DisraeliGears01 - thank you for the info!

Weird thing with my coworker - she has creator permission on that base because I was at the “throw my hands up and give all permissions” point of the process. Still no permission for adding task templates to projects. 🤦🏻 Even tried giving access to another coworker and she had DIFFERENT templates she could use but not others.

And maybe! That view sounds pretty rad. Maybe one of these days I’ll get to explore all of the Enterprise goodies but today is not that day. 😂

​@DisraeliGears01 ​@Chris_Moore This whole thread honestly feels very nonprofit Airtable 😅

Starts with “we just need a better way to track this one thing” and somehow ends with one person becoming the accidental systems admin for an entire department.

Also the custom Kanban situation absolutely made me laugh because I can 100% picture a team getting attached to a workflow that makes total sense to them operationally… while quietly terrifying the person maintaining it behind the scenes 😂

But genuinely, I think this is such a valuable conversation. The permissions weirdness, the “only one person understands the backend”, the tension between flexibility and maintainability… I suspect a LOT of nonprofit teams are dealing with some version of this.

We’re actually planning a few webinars/community sessions for this group soon (tiny spoiler 👀), and honestly this feels like it could be a really good topic to unpack together with people sharing real setups and real operational chaos instead of “perfect system” examples

Because most of the time these systems didn’t become complicated because people made bad decisions. Usually it’s just small teams moving fast, limited resources, no dedicated ops support, and Airtable slowly becoming mission critical before anyone fully realizes it 😅

​@Pello - Can’t wait for the sessions!!

I don’t know about other orgs, but mine is pretty sensitive about its data. I’m low-key working towards being a part-time contractor for Airtable setups/functionality with some of my museum buddies and have had to create a portfolio version to be able to show the functionality without the data. I’m so grateful for Omni being able to generate example data but it’s taking forever to replace all of the data. I never really thought about how we slowly accumulated so much data on Airtable but here we are. Everything from active projects to department staffing history to analysis on exhibition costs, we’ve got it in Airtable. Even AI is starting to struggle with connecting the simplified pieces together. 🤦🏻

​@Chris_Moore 

Have you already tried Claude with the native Airtable connector? We’ve found it handles large/interconnected bases much better than trying to recreate everything externally with sample data. We still use Omni sometimes for quick mockups, but then usually switch over to Claude for the actual iteration/building work inside Airtable itself.

​@Pello 

Somehow, I’m the most technologically advanced person in my department and also a complete Luddite in the Airtable community. I have not tried this! In fact, I’ve only tried 1 integration/connector and it was a complete bust. I’ll have to look into Claude.

Thank you for the tip!

We have worked so hard to bring structure and standardized workflows since I joined the org in the fall of ‘22. We use Airtable for all of our programmatic data, evaluations, training information, and some internal staff information. I’m data guru and also the only person who knows how it all works. I went on maternity leave last year and it was one big test to see how well I’ve done on sustainability and making things user-friendly to maintain program information.

I’m still building our dashboards (one internal for just staff, one for our board) in separate platforms (Excel and Canva) for the super customization, plus I pull in information from our other systems. I still do line-by-line level data validation and clean up every quarter and chase people down to make sure all their program data is submitted. I need to expand our interfaces to create more centralized places for our work flows and where to enter what data where. But every little change and update goes through me. I feel like IT occassionally.

​@EGSkelator Thanks for sharing that. Honestly, the maternity leave stress test is probably one of the strongest indicators that you built something genuinely useful and resilient!! 👏

Also, I sometimes think the deeper we get into Airtable/ops work, the more we realize there’s no such thing as a truly “finished” perfect system.. Operational reality keeps changing.

That’s partly why I’ve become a big believer in treating systems more like projects/sprints with “good stable version for now” moments instead of endlessly trying to optimize everything forever.

And honestly, communities like this + tools like Claude connected to Airtable are starting to make the “only one person understands the system” problem a bit less scary.

I feel this in my bones. I was out for 3 months on medical leave and had the same feeling while heading out. Nothing broke irrevocably but there were definitely some hiccups I had to fix when I came back.

Thinking about the Excel/Canva process you’ve currently got, I was doing the same thing for each of the big projects I’m working on (generally 3-6 projects at a time) and it’s something I dread every month. I ended up signing up for the Airtable Canvas beta testing and had it create a project management dashboard/status report generator for one of our projects using information from that base like timeline, budget, risks and issues, etc. It turned out **super good** and just needs a few tweaks. If you happen to get onto that testing, I highly recommend it.

Wait, what? I would love to poke around that beta testing for that integration. How can I find more information? My searches aren’t yielding any results.

Yeah, this hits home for so many nonprofits. Donor data in one place, grants in another, budget tracking in a spreadsheet that three people have different versions of... it's exhausting trying to get a clear picture.

I've seen a few orgs tackle this by building a simple Airtable hub that ties it all together — donors linked to grants, grants linked to budgets, reports that pull from live data instead of someone spending a day copy-pasting. It doesn't have to be complicated to make a huge difference.

What's the biggest pain point for you guys right now? Always curious what ends up being the priority.