Welcome to the Seattle Crew! Introduce yourself here

​@Chris_Moore Thanks for getting this started!

After the non-profit group started and several of us were located in the PNW I was hoping we could have a more local group. I did this over in the non-profit one but just to reintroduce…

Name: Drew Whatley

Company/Role: Opportunity Council- Lead Resource Data Specialist

Location: Bellingham WA

How are you using Airtable? We maintain a county wide social service resource directory on Airtable, but then I also do our web analytics tracking and event calendar through Airtable. 

What's the coolest thing you've built (or want to build) with Airtable? My coolest implementations were at my previous museum job, using Airtable for docent scheduling, field trip booking, camp registrations, and tons else. I was always partial to the attendance tracking system I built to provide insight into visitor attendance trends correlated by date and exhibitions (not that anybody ever listened to the data sigh)

What would you like to see from this group? Meet-ups are great, and I just generally love to share expertise. 

​@DisraeliGears01 My pleasure! Happy to be getting this rolling!

Oooooh - I made a local museum contractor database for the museums in the area. I’ve gotten sidetracked with current exhibitions, but it’s been a collective goal of Seattle museums to have something like this and I’d love to compare notes with you on regional databases.

And lol - how is it that everyone wants to have data, but seemingly no one wants to do anything with it?

I was just up in Bham for my niece’s graduation from BHS! Are you able to make it down for the meetup? I was thinking about how folks in Bellevue might consider the commute a bit long and how we might want to do some eastside meetups. Maybe some northern ones should be on the list, too. 🤷🏻

Always happy to chat databases 🤓 haha

I signed up to save a spot for the Seattle meet-up, but I need to check personal scheduling to see if I can make it. I’m definitely going to try though! And yeah a northside meetup eventually would be a great idea, even if it’s just Everett that shaves off some transit/traffic time (and might make it more amendable to anybody up in Vancouver)

Very excited to see this group start up!

Name: Sara Guirgis

Company/Role: ServiceNow / Optimization Manager (how cool is it that I get to do this for work?!)

Location: Bothell, WA

How are you using Airtable? I had the opportunity to become an expert Airtable builder while working on operations for an enablement organization. I loved the product and capabilities so much that I use it for my personal life too or organize and automate my life.

What's the coolest thing you've built (or want to build) with Airtable? Probably the highly complex onboarding workflow for a large, global sales enablembent organization. We tracked, automated, and managed everything from new hire data to course enrollment to attendance to surveys to winners and prized in Airtable!

What would you like to see from this group? (This really helps us plan future events and programming!)
Meeting and learning from other Airtable power users; ideas for other implementations; discussing challenges and brainstorming solutions.

Name: Adrienne Kortas

Company/Role: Executive Coach, owner of solo practice (Kortas Coaching & Consulting)

Location: Seattle (Maple Leaf)

How are you using Airtable? I use Airtable to manage my engagements, track prospects, schedule invoices, plan social media posts, onboard new clients, and analyze data. I seem to find a new use case every week. I love AirTable.

What's the coolest thing you've built (or want to build) with Airtable? I use it with Claude Cowork and recently I had it come up with a business development base that helps me see what I’m currently “selling” and what offerings were underutilized, then a tailored table of outreach activities that I can schedule. Referrals keep me operating at or near capacity but I’ve always thought I should put more energy into intentionally developing a pipeline. This makes it easy for me.

What would you like to see from this group? (This really helps us plan future events and programming!) Demos from real users/experts - I need ideas for all the ways I could be using AirTable, and perhaps some tips/tricks for managing bases/tables/integrations. AI and vibe coding is great for someone like me but it can get messy real fast. Also, maybe a mentor/expert to review my work (I’m happy to contribute as well for newer users.)

​@AdrienneK and ​@saraguirgis Looooooooving the ideas around sharing bases, discussing upgrades/options, and all the ways that we can help one another! Community care is something that I really nerd out about… I bet we could build a base for that. 🤣

Name: Tyler Farr

Company/Role: Integrator at AEON Law (think COO)

Location: I'm in the Tacoma area. AEON Law is a Seattle-based IP firm — virtual, with attorneys across the country.

How are you using Airtable? It's the backbone of our whole firm. CRM, intake, fee sheets, trust reconciliation, project management — all of it lives in Airtable and ties into QuickBooks, Make.com, AppColl, and M365. Not a side tool for us; the firm runs on it.

What's the coolest thing you've built (or want to build)? A CRM-to-project-management pipeline that handles most of our practice management — including an automated engagement process with notifications along the way. It connects marketing data through the whole client lifecycle and ties it to financial data, even pulling CallRail click metrics on incoming leads. So we can follow a client from first click all the way through to the financials.

What would you like to see from this group? Buildathons and real teardowns. One thing I'd specifically love to dig into: document generation out of Airtable — contracts with variable fields and dynamic-length sections that flow into signature blocks correctly. Curious how people are handling that.

Name: Alissa Frederick

Company/Role: Donations and Data Coordinator at a charity

Location: Puyallup/South Hill

How are you using Airtable? We are using it to track applications that come in for assistance and track the progress of those applications through our steps of funding.

What's the coolest thing you've built (or want to build) with Airtable? I am an accountant by training with very limited computer programing or database skills so pretty much anything I make that actually works I am impressed with

What would you like to see from this group? if someone has suggestions on better ways to accomplish what I am trying to do I am very open to ideas.  We have an EXTREMELY limited budget -- we want our money to fund the need -- and I don’t think our usage is what AirTable was set up to actually do so none of the wikis or trainings really have broadly applied.

Sorry I missed the meet-up, but the weather was too good and my SUP and the lake were calling.

Hey ​@TheTEARSFoundation! There are actually quite a few of us who work for nonprofits and attended the meetup this week (totally get it about the water, though - it was hot in there). There was a fair bit of interest around low-cost or free ways of using Airtable for different types of nonprofit management and skill shares between orgs. I’ll be putting out a psuedo-poll around topics for the next meetup that should be happening sometime in August.

I use Airtable for my nonprofit with timelines, budgets, resource planning/allocation, drawing plans/approvals, and a lot more. We’ve still got the random excel spreadsheet templates that we use before we’re not quite ready to build out the plan in Airtable but all our project-based information eventually makes its way over. I’m curious what your use cases are and how they’re not quite matching up with what you’re looking for.

Always happy to help solve problems or streamline, but what challenges are you facing/think could work better? Airtable is kind of what you make it, and lots of the documented help/events are either out of date due to updates over the years or focused on for-profit use cases. 

One common problem to self-built Airtable implementations from non-technical folks (this was me years ago!) is approaching it like web Excel, which it really isn’t. To get the most out of it you need multiple linked tables in your bases, with automations to help on repetitive tasks and interfaces for folks to engage with.