Sign Up Sheets - Is this possible?

[Cannuk]

Hello all

This thread is only to ask if anyone can confirm if this is possible… and if it is… then WOOHOO, I will sign up for a Pro account immediately and abandon my attempts at this in FileMakerPro!!!

Scenario: I run a youth program with about 85 teenagers enrolled. Throughout the year we offer trips, excursions, courses, events, competitions, etc. In preparation for each event, I need to know how many kids intent to participate so I can plan for meals, resources, transportation, etc.

Currently I am doing this via Google Forms. I create one form for each event, and ask the kids to fill it in if they want to participate. But that means that every single time they have to enter their first name, last name, email address, phone number, etc. Which is crazy, since I have all that info already. But by doing it this way, the Google Form fills out a Google Sheet, which becomes my roster of attendees for planning, attendance, contact roster, etc.

Two days ago a friend introduced me to AirTable… and I am hopeful this will be a superior platform for this project.

I want to create a mechanism where the kids can log onto a personal page and check which event(s) they wish to participate in. Each person would have their own page, pre-populated with their name, phone number, etc. The only thing they would be doing is checking yes/no to the listed events.

This way I can have one database with all their contact information in one place, and one place to manage the list of events. I realize I would likely have to configure one page for each child, which is fine. It would be a simple matter of copy/paste/tweak I imagine. But this would eliminate the need for each kid to fill out the form every time, they could simply log onto their page and review the newest events and opt into them.

The two big requirements I’m seeking confirmation that are possible is 1) could I create a page for each kid that would have a unique password to access it, and 2) could I create that page with that specific child’s info and list of events they could select Yes/No for.

If those are possible, then I am highly confident all the other needs can also be done (rosters, etc.)

I’m not seeking the solution here by any means… simply seeking if this scenario is possible in Air Table… and if so, then I shall immediately begin learning AT!

Thanks in advance to anyone who can chime in and guide me as to whether or not this is doable.

(sidenote: it is totally possible in FileMakerPro, but FMP is overkill for my needs… It’s like taking a tank to 7-11 to buy milk in this case!)

[Danny]

Hey! It won’t work exactly as you’ve suggested, but I think there’s still a good solution here.

Password protection
With the pro plan you can password protect a form. However, you can’t setup a unique password for every student. Each student would have to use the same password to unlock the form.

Form with a Specific Child’s Info
The form is basically just a layer over the table, so you can’t setup a unique form for each child without setting up a separate table for each child, which would be silly. However, you can hide information from a form in general.

Potential Solution
First you can setup a table with the list of events.

Events

• Name
• Date
• Location
  …

Then, if you already have all the info for the kids, you can setup a table with all that info. Let’s call that your kids table.

Kids

• First name
• Last name
• Phone
  …

Now you can create a third table linking the two, which for lack of a better term, I’ll call the participation table.

Participation

• Kid name (single select link to Kid table)
• Events (multi-select linked to Events table)

You can create a form view of this table and share it with the kids. It will contain two select fields, where they’ll choose their name from the list and the events they want to participate in. If you want to bring more of their info into the table to make it comprehensive, you can do so with “lookup fields” and they won’t appear in the form view so no one with the form can see the rest of the underlying data.

Doing it this way, you can share the form without any password and the only data publicly visible would be the names and events. That would require only the free plan. If you still wanted to have the password, even though it would be the same for everyone, you could do so with the pro plan.

I know you were basically just looking for a yes or no, but I wanted to provide more context since it would be slightly different from what you laid out :slightly_smiling_face:

[Cannuk]

Thanks Danny… I feared it would be limited as you described. Sadly, AirTable won’t work for this particular project, but I"m having fun playing with it for others!

[HannesK-ME]

Hey there, I realize that this is an old thread, but just in case anybody comes across this in the future I just wanted to point out that miniExtensions offers a portal that is ideal for just this kind of use case! You would have a users table in Airtable that holds one record for each of your users (the kids in your case). That users table is then linked to different data tables, for example a table of events. Each user could then log in to the portal with the data from the users table (email and password, for example) and see the records associated to them. You could also choose to show a view with all records, not just the ones they are linked to, so they could link themselves to new events and sign up for them that way. It's very powerful and would probably be a perfect fit for this! You can do similar things with Airtable Interfaces now, but every user would have to have an Airtable account, whereas with miniExtensions every user is just a record in Airtable, so you can have as many as you like! 🙂