Adding a bulk reference between tables

[Dan_Smith]

I would guess this question has been asked and answered before, but I can't find an answer.

I have a table of contacts and a table of campaigns. I would like to be able to filter the contacts by whatever criteria, and then add a bulk cross reference to that filtered group in a row of the campaigns table, populating the 'Link to another record' field.

For example, I have a group of individuals I would like to contact for an event mailing. I have a row in the campaigns table that has details of the event mailing (description, date, etc), and I want to keep a record of everyone who was contacted.

If that makes sense as a requirement, is it a job for an automations?

[Sistema_Aotearo]

I'm currently doing a similar thing in two different ways.

1. Automatically adding people to recurring events
2. Selecting specific people to go to specific events

Automatically adding people to recurring events:

On my "Schedule" table, I set up a date & time field that I'll use as my trigger for an automation. Anytime this field gets updated, my automation will run for that event. You can additionally use the "Batch Update" extension to trigger the automation over an entire view! I set this to update a view that only shows my future events.

As for the automation:

Trigger: When Record is Updated

• Watching that Date & Time field we just made

Action: Find Records

• Find Records in my Contacts table. You can set your "whatever criteria" here.
• The best way to do this is to use the Dynamic conditions and base it on your event's information and just make sure they match.
• eg Contact 1 is labelled "Group C", Event has a multi-select that says any of "Group A" or "Group C"

Action: Update Record

• Update "triggered" record (Airtable record ID)
• Update the link field with the list of records found in the previous action

Selecting specific people to go to specific events

This automation is similar to the other. However, in the action "Find Records" you can base that on a view instead of a condition.

All you need now is to make a view in your contact table that you can adjust to whatever criteria you want, and those will be the contacts added.

You can also change the trigger. I like to use a calendar interface for this one. Allow users to expand the event details and place a button. Set the button to "run automation" and hook it up.

If you want to use the same trigger, you'll have to put a bit of conditional logic on your automation else they'll start fighting each other haha.

I made a test base you you want to look through:

https://www.airtable.com/universe/expG2qgJGiKFsUUAu/for-dan_smith

Let me know if this is what you're looking for 🙂

[ScottWorld]

Great solution from @Sistema_Aotearo here! 😎🙌

One important thing to note is that Airtable’s Find Records action has a massive limitation. It can only find a maximum of 100 records.

So if you’re anticipating more than 100 contacts attending an event, you would need to turn to another way of doing this.

One of the most popular ways of doing this would be to rebuild the exact same automation with Make’s Airtable automations, which doesn’t force any record limits.

There is a small learning curve with Make, which is why I created this basic navigation video to help. In that thread, I also provide the links to a few other Make training resources there as well. For example, to instantly trigger your Make scenarios from Airtable, check out this thread.

p.s. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable/Make consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld 

[Dan_Smith]

Hi Sistema_Aotearo. Thank you so much for this generous and useful response. I'm still investigating what we need our little system to do as we're working on a prototype at the moment, but this has helped me clarify what's possible.

[Dan_Smith]

Hi ScottWorld – that's very useful information on the Find Records limitation, thank you. I'm still working out what we need to do with our system but this has given me good context. Thanks for sharing your expertise.