Re: Help with Strategy and Probably Custom Development
Hello!
We’re helping a client build their marketing site, and we also want to help release an MVP using Airtable (I think).
Overview:
The app will match a “teacher” with “student”. Each party will receive an email introducing them, and encouraging the next steps.
Everyone will register through the site; this is an easy part— to connect Typeform to Airtable to collect all the data. (2 forms: teacher form + student form)
On the admin backend, the “matching” of the teacher and student will be done manually.
The admin will manually select both parties from a list and click to send both parties the same HTML email that contains connection instructions. (one email send to both parties)
So here are the questions…
Is it possible to build functionality to select two rows (teacher & student) and fire-off a pre-formatted HTML email to these members?
What platform be needed to hold the email template and on-command, populate several fields with data from Airtable + send the email?
To have an admin record of the pairing, we also need a way to write back to Airtable. (my thought— this could be triggered by a “CC” on the email, but maybe there’s a better way)
There will be other needs— the admin should be able to filter the records to narrow the list. In my generic view, I’m showing a handful of records, but there could be hundreds to wade through.
If possible, an interesting solution could be to:
[1] Find a student
[2] Lock student
[3] Find a teacher
[4] Lock a teacher
[5] Mash the GO Button
I’m sure several of you have awesome answers!
Please post comments/questions here, or email me directly: hello@squareflair.com
Alan Houser
Airtable Support just blew my mind. Before posting to the forum, I send the same question to Support, and (Laurie) replied with this!
(I told her the following too)
Please know that this type of response is key to converting me from tire-kicker to platform champion.
__________ SUPPORT __________
I’ve given some thought to your setup and have the following suggestions.
- I assume you have a Teacher table and a Student table.
- I would then create a third table called Pairing (or some other name that makes sense).
- You would then create a linked record in the Pairing table to Student and another for Teacher.
- Next, add a Status field (single select would work well here) with Go, Tentative or other statuses for the pairing.
- Finally, use a lookup field in the Pairing table to pull in the Student’s email and the Teacher’s email. With this, each time you add a student or teacher, the email will automatically populate in the Pairing table.
That would take care of how to pair up the students and teachers. You would next want to use an integration service like Zapier to make a custom email that would send to both the teacher and the student. To get started with building a Zapier integration for Airtable, I’d recommend taking a look at (redacted: Using-Zapier-to-integrate-Airtable-with-other-apps-and-services). We have a specific article for custom emails at (redacted)
