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I’ve been playing around with Airtable for the past month. I think it’s possible to do what I want, but I’m not sure without upgrading to the Pro plan, and even then I’m not certain of the details. I wondered if anyone knows of a similar example I could follow.



Our club meets twice a month and members have requested SMS reminders of meetings. I have a table of members requesting SMS. I have a table of upcoming meetings.



I was thinking I could have a new table that would display just the next meeting when it is 5 days away (via filtering). So most times this view would be empty, then 5 days before a meeting, one record would appear, my trigger for block automation.



The new meeting record in the view would trigger the “Send SMS Block”, sending a reminder to each member in the “Members Requesting Reminders” table. And probably set a “done” value in the Meeting record so that it disappears from the Upcoming Meeting view so it cannot run again.



Wow that sounded simpler in my head before I typed it out. Thanks for any ideas you have.

Welcome to the community, @slothbear! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: I haven’t used the Send SMS block yet, so this is pure speculation, but if it’s anything like the Sendgrid block (which sends emails), it must be kicked off manually. It’s not a trigger-based system that will automatically respond to changes in views. In fact, I don’t think that any of Airtable’s blocks operate that way. They may build content automatically, but nothing is delivered (i.e. emails, SMS messages) without user intervention.



To do that kind of automatic triggering, you’ll need to use a third-party service like Zapier or Integromat. Both systems let you tie into various SMS delivery services, though Zapier has the slight advantage of having a built-in “new record in view” trigger, which would tie into your proposed system nicely, and you probably only need a two-step zap, so this could be done with the free Zapier account.



To pull this off in Integromat, you would need to start the scenario with an Airtable search module, tailor the search to find some data in a meeting record that indicates when it’s 5 days away (perhaps via a formula field), and schedule the scenario to run daily.

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