General advice needed on whether Airtable is the solution I’m looking for

[john_purdie]

Apologies if I’ve posted in the wrong section.

I’m looking for a Kickstarter fulfillment management solution. Is Airtable the correct approach for me or would I be better served by sticking to Mailchimp?

I need to refer to and update about 1800 personal records with backer no.s and UIDs, what they’ve paid for or haven’t paid for.

I need to distribute individual digital keys via email and be able to check if an email has been opened.

Currently I’m using MailChimp for this but it’s clearly not suited for database management vs Airtable.

Bottom line: Airtable will clearly provide me with a relatively easy to use database but will the email management tools or add-ons be as effective as MailChimp’s?

Any advice would be gratefully received.

FWIW the built in tools for communicating with Backers on the Kickstarter site are woefully inadequate and 3rd party solutions are very expensive. We’re cleaning someone else’s Kickstarter so it’s a thankless task as we didn’t receive a cent of the original pledge money.

[ScottWorld]

Short answer: No.

Airtable is not an email management tool, and it has extremely limited email capabilities. You should stick with MailChimp. MailChimp also has some database capabilities: it gives you the ability to add extra fields to your contacts where you can track extra details that you want to track.

If you want to have some communication between MailChimp and Airtable, you can use Integromat:

Integromat

Mailchimp Integrations

Integromat gives you the ability to integrate Mailchimp with many other services.

[john_purdie]

Thanks ScottWorld. That’s saved me a world of pain. I’ll put up with the relative clumsiness of MailChimp as a database for its built for purpose email capabilities.

JohnP

[Bill_French]

john_purdie:

I’m looking for a Kickstarter fulfillment management solution.

I often find things to disagree with @ScottWorld about but this is not one of them. :winking_face:

His advice is spot-on. Email communication is key to a successful Kickstarted campaign and Airtable is woefully underpowered. And if you are really successful, this is not where you want to try to cut corners.

I would add that you should probably look at many of the successful campaigns and what they each used. Solutions like ShipMonk have performed well in these processes - yes, costly, but the transparency of a Kickstart campaign requires no missteps.

You should start a campaign to get funding to make this management process cheaper for all. I would toss in $10.

[john_purdie]

Thanks for that Bill

Agreed, there’s definitely a market of some sort out there for a subscription service which serves the smaller, less well funder Kickstarter campaign. I have thought about it but it will have to wait until I’m through this project
:winking_face: