Merging data in from Typeform entries

[Clark_Price]

Hi All,

So I have a question about the best way to merge data. I manage a scholarship program for a festival that happens once a year. We've been using airtable the last few years to manage the staff, artists, and scholarship recipients. We saw a lot of success converting our emails into Typeforms last year and want to expand on that.

We use a typeform application for people to apply and then pull those who are selected into an 'Accepted' View. We intend on sending 4-5 typeforms with questions so we will need to merge their answers into each of their 'Applicant' profile. 

The typeform will ask for the same email address they applied with and I would use that to direct the merge. This is going to create a lot of multiple 'accounts' and I want to make sure our data stays tidy and manageable. 

Rundown:

1. John Snow is accepted.

2. We send out  Typeform 1, 2, 3, and 4 out to John

3. John fills out the typeformform as he recieves them, the data is collected and sent into airtable via the integrations

4. We would then have 5 'Jon Snows' per se. The initial acceptance and then the 4 entries from Typeform.

My plan is to merge that data each time we send out a typeform. Anyone have any guidance with this? I don't want this to happen automatically at first, I would feel better about manually merging the data in case something happens. I expect some people will mispell their email, so some sort of log error would be helpful if the email can't be found.  I hope this explains what I'm trying to do, please feel free to ask any questions you have.

Thank you!

[ScottWorld]

Personally, I would not recommend that approach.

I would recommend using Fillout's advanced forms for Airtable instead.

Fillout offers hundreds of advanced form features for Airtable, including the ability to update existing Airtable records from a form. 

All you would need to do is send each applicant their unique Fillout links for each form (which would be automatically generated for each applicant), and they can update the fields that you allow them to update directly in their own Airtable record. 

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld 

[TheTimeSavingCo]

For the automated bit, check out Airtable's guide on how to find and link records via automations: https://support.airtable.com/docs/linking-existing-records-using-automations

I'm assuming each of the Typeforms goes into a different table as well, so you have 5 tables?  If so, you could try linking all the Typeform records to the single record from your original table with the "Accepted" view and just create lookup fields to display everything

For mispelling their emails, you could use conditional logic to detect when no record was found with that email and you could send yourself an alert maybe

For doing it manually, I guess you'd just eyeball it?  Not too sure what you're asking for that bit, sorry!

[Clark_Price]

This looks great, but the reason we are using typeform is that we can make the information more engaging then a regular form. Theres a lot of mundane but important informartion in the forms, but we incorporate videos, images, and can break the form up slide by slide, etc.

[ScottWorld]

@Clark_Price 

Right, all of those things are exactly what you can do with Fillout. Embedding videos, embedding images, breaking up your form slide by slide, and so much more. Fillout was designed as a more advanced replacement for Typeform. Everything that you can do in Typeform, you can do in Fillout... but you can do thousands of extra things as well.

However, if you still want to stick with Typeform (which I would not personally recommend), my next recommendation would be to solve your problem using Make's TypeForm integrations and Make's Airtable integrations. That's because Make can make both the creation & merging of your data much easier than Airtable's automations alone.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances here.

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