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.