Stakeholder Approval from outside of Airtable/without an account

[pittmarcomm]

Hi everyone,

I work for a higher education University using an enterprise account. For approving communications and other projects, it would improve our workflow if I could share a view and allow the Stakeholder to click a button that would approve the project/communication and move it to the next stage. Another option would be if there was some sort of "reply APPROVED" option to an email that would automatically insert "APPROVED" into a field in Airtable.

Is any of this possible?

Thanks!

Nick

[TheTimeSavingCo]

If they have a paid Airtable account, you could give them a checkbox to mark in that view, and have an automation trigger on that checkbox and move it to the next stage?

If they have an Airtable account that isn't paid, you could create a prefilled form URL in that view.  The form's prefill would include the project/communication's record ID (or some other identifier), and you could have an automation trigger once the form is submitted that would search for the record that they were at when they submitted the form, and then move that to the next stage

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re: Another option would be if there was some sort of "reply APPROVED" option to an email that would automatically insert "APPROVED" into a field in Airtable.

Yeap, this is possible.  You'd need some sort of identifier within the subject / message of the email itself and you'd need some way of receiving the email.  If you're using Outlook, you could use the Airtable trigger for receiving Outlook emails, if not you'd need to use a third party automation service like Zapier or Make

[pittmarcomm]

Hey there Adam - thanks for the quick response! So unfortunately we can't rely on getting all of our Stakeholders Airtable accounts, so that won't be a solution. But thank you. As for the second solution, what do you mean by the "some sort of identifier within the subject / message of the email itself and you'd need some way of receiving the email"?

We do use outlook, and I'm very familiar with automation, so this might work very well!

[TheTimeSavingCo]

The idenfitier would be used in an automation to find the record we need to move to the next stage.  Within your context, you could use the record ID of the project / communication record, or if you already have unique identifiers per project you can use those instead

You could then put that record ID in the subject of the email, which would allow your automation to grab it

The bit about needing some way to receive the email is about how to get the email data into Airtable automatically.  Given that you're using Outlook you can use the Outlook "When email is received" automation trigger and create a new record in your base.  This would place the email subject, and thus the record ID, into your Airtable, allowing your automation to use that data, does that make sense?

[pittmarcomm]

I think I understand what you're saying. The only thing is that I would want the email to only update one field rather than creating a whole new record. Is that possible?

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Nope, I'm afraid not.  You could run an automation to delete the record that gets created after you've successfully updated the relevant records though