Review our Setup for Tracking Contacts in Airtable

Background: The National Urban League is a historic civil rights and urban advocacy organization with 90 affiliates across the country, providing direct services in five key areas: Education, Entrepreneurship, Health, Housing, and Workforce Development.

Over the past three years, we've been using Airtable to centralize data across our Programs department. While two out of five divisions have been actively using paid licenses, most staff have had view-only access with free licenses. In May 2025, we transitioned to an Enterprise license. In looking to use the Enterprise capabilities, we are requesting a brief evaluation and brainstorming session with someone who has Airtable or no-code/low-code relational database experience (e.g., Smartsheet, Monday.com, Baserow, etc.).

Where we are now: We've seen improvements in efficiency and data quality, but as we prepare to add more users, we want to optimize our base for scalability and ensure best practices. This session will focus on our current base setup related to affiliate contact management. Department-wide, we need to track our Affiliate CEOs, plus additional executive staffers and finance points of contact, and at the division-level, our staff need to track programmatic leads. Ultimately, we want to know that we are on the right track before we open up syncing data to more users.

We have prepared for this session by optimizing the current base to the best of our ability and preparing specific questions to guide the discussion. Based on this session, there is potential for a longer-term project as we work to define verified data sets, build out managed app for our department, and develop staff training at a later date.