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Select Multiple People to Email

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Aaron_Reynolds_
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

If I have a Multi-Select field that has many names of people who need to be included in communication, can I setup an Automation to see all those names and then use a Contacts table to pull the correct emails in to add in the To line for the email in the Automation?

One thought I had is somehow to create a Contacts Table and then in the drop down I would show a Concatenate of the person’s name and an Employee ID. Then somehow use an automation to break out and fill a field with only the Employee ID. Then use that Employee ID in another automation that would fill the email addresses. Then somehow use that to fill in on the email automation.

I don’t know if this is too complicated. I am not wanting to purchase anything else at this time from other programs. I am a Pro user in Airtable.

Am I being too complicated with this?

Is there a simpler way?

3 Replies 3

Hello!

So… I recommend that you tweak your base structure a little bit.

Let’s start here:
You have a multiple select field with options for each contact.
Each contact has relevant information that you need to use in a Send Email automation.


It would be much easier and much more efficient to create a new table for each of your contacts.
There are a few advantages of doing this.

  1. By creating a new record for each contact, you can hold a ton of data about only that contact. This means you can store email addresses, phone numbers, contact notes, etc.
  2. You can use your automation to find the relevant information you want about that contact and leave the rest out.

Here’s How To Do It

So, let’s say for example you have a table where you have a list of your projects.
In this example, I have fields for contacts/stakeholders, project notes, goal date, and project statuses.

image


In the next table, Contacts, I have records for each of my individual contacts.

image

Now, there are a couple of ways you could solve the email automation problem, so here’s one of the methods.

  1. Create a lookup field to grab the emails from the Contacts table. These will come in with comma separators. (This will come in handy later).

  2. Now you’ll need something to set off a trigger for your automation. I’m not sure what your method is, but I’m going to create a quick n’ dirty checkbox field in my example called Mid-Point Email Sent.

  3. Create your automation - For this example, I’ll create one using a condition as a trigger. I’ll use the condition of when {checkbox} = true.

image

I’ll go ahead and skip the unconditional actions since I don’t have a use for them.
For the first conditional action, I’ll declare that the Contacts linked field must have at least one linked record in order for it to run. This way there will always be an email in the lookup to send the email to.

There is a world where this fails though. This method requires that you must have an email value for every contact in the Contacts table. If you have a single contact linked and the email field is blank, then the email will fire off into the lonely void of nothingness. And since the automation did a successful run, it won’t alert you to the fact that it functionally failed.

Here’s the setup for the conditional.
image


Now, for the email itself. Fill everything out as you'd like. For the recipients of the email, all you need to do is insert the value of the email lookup field. Since the values are automatically comma-separated, you satisfy the requirements for sending the email to multiple email addresses (if applicable).

image

So… yeah, that’s it.
(lemme know if it doesn’t make sense, if you have any additional questions, or if I’m just plain out wrong lol)

I’m definitely going to look into this but I have over 350 people I just need to pull email address from to send confirmation of a form submitted and another when a field is set to Complete.

So having a table for each person seems too many.

I think that Ben’s post has a typo:

I think he meant “record”, not “table.” Shortly after he clarifies by saying (emphasis mine):