Help

The Community will be temporarily unavailable starting on Friday February 28. We’ll be back as soon as we can! To learn more, check out our Announcements blog post.

Communicating Shifts to Hundreds of non Base Members

785 2
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
pearbiscuits
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

I'm looking for a way to communicate shift assignments to hundreds of individuals who are not members of my base. I use Airtable to manage poll workers. For their work assignments, I integrate Airtable with Make.com. When a staff member offers an assignment to someone, Make.com compiles data from multiple tables into an email.

Each assignment has a set schedule. Schedule details have been included in the email in a bulleted list. The source for that list is a long text field with RTF enabled. 

The schedule descriptions are often complicated and a list is not the best way to display the info. I'd like to incorporate a separate Shifts table that can be linked to the assignments. This would allow much more specificity in describing the work schedule. 

Ideally, this is what I would like to get out of this, and I'm not sure the best way to go about it:

  • In the initial offer email, clearly list all of the shifts that the person would be required to work
    • I've been imagining a table in the email. Some assignments have MANY shifts. In those cases it would be nice if the table could be a PDF attachment, or a link to some other view, but it's not necessary. I'll make do with a lengthy email if necessary.
  • Quickly re-communicate just the shifts to any poll worker as needed.
    • E.g., after accepting the assignment, a poll worker says there is one day they won't be available. A staff member can make that change and click a button to share the shifts again. (or the shifts are visible in some other way?)

My searching has turned up options to create PDFs, but as best as I can tell that has to be done on a one-by-one basis, which won't work for hiring 800+ people. I've hit a wall and suspect someone else will have an idea that I'm missing!

2 Replies 2

Yeah creating that 'Shifts' table sounds right

Are all the tables that Make.com compiles data from within the same base?  If so, I reckon I'd try creating a new table where each record represents a single offer to a single worker, includes details specific to that offer, and is linked to all the shifts for that offer

You can then set up an automation that will run a "Find Record" action to grab all the shifts linked to an offer and insert that into the email as a table, and you could use the "Send Gmail" action if you were hitting limits about emailing non-collaborators daily

If some of the data's in another base it gets slightly trickier, and I think I'd either try to sync stuff over via a view or use Make to update the "Offer" record with the relevant details before using Airtable to send it out, does that make sense?

Thanks!

Yes - everything that Make.com is using is in the same Base. I've already been using this setup for a while, without the Shifts part:

  • Roles Table
  • Locations Table
  • Elections Table
  • Vacancies Table (combining Roles/Locations/Elections for election-specific vacancies)
  • People Table
  • Assignments (combining People and Vacancies - essentially offers that then get accepted/declined)

So I'd add a Shifts table and link those to the Vacancy and then later the Assignment and the Person. I've only really been sending Assignment communications through Make.com since I can do a lot more with conditional language, but I like the idea of using the Find Records action to easily send a table of Shifts to people on-demand.