![]() ![]() Zapier automates connecting different apps together (you can sign up here). You will also need a Twilio phone number, which you can set up from your Console. Here’s where to sign up for an account if you don’t have one already. Chloe Condon and I once used it to build a Mean Girls’ day bot, and Twilio Champions get up to all kinds of projects.įrom my experience with Twilio, I knew it could handle texting this nonprofit’s volunteers. I called this View Volunteer Reminder Texts.Īirtable should be good to go from here! Time to leave spreadsheets behind for a minute and head over to Twilio.ĭevelopers use Twilio to programmatically send and receive calls and texts, but the limit really does not exist. I also added a filter to make sure we’re only looking at events that haven’t happened yet, where their Hours Until Event hasn’t dropped below zero. ![]() With all that in place, I set up an Airtable View to filter for records where Hours Until Event hits the point when I need to send a text, so fewer than four hours before. We add another column called Matched Volunteer Phone Numbers that sees those Matched Volunteers and looks up their corresponding Uniform Phone Numbers in the original Volunteers table.īack to our regularly scheduled post, now that assumptions have been updated. Now, back to the Events table and our Matched Volunteers. I added in an Hours Until Event formula column to sort it out with DATETIME_DIFF(), and replaces all nonnumeric characters with empty strings using SUBSTITUTE. I knew I needed to send a text reminder n hours before an event, so a column that calculated the number of hours until an event cold fit my use case. While there is a Date type for columns in Airtable, there is no separate Time type, so I needed to come up with a workaround. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to spot the “Include a time field” toggle in Airtable, but can I really be blamed - what is time these days? The first change I made was to make the When field in Events more granular, adding in a timestamp. The Events tab (or table) lists out the volunteering opportunities that come our way, including who asked for help (typically somebody in the Needs table), the kind of help they're asking for, and when and where we've scheduled a time to support. Have a look at the Volunteer Coordination Base template, and I’ll walk you through what’s special. The nonprofit I work with uses Airtable to collect volunteer sign-ups and to match them with volunteering opportunities, so I dived into their existing system to see how I could work with it.Īfter looking at their setup and reading up on Airtable’s docs and community forums, I learned I would need to change a few things to get automated text reminders working. It would be impossible to manually text every volunteer who signs up for a shift to remind them when and where to be, but Airtable, Twilio, and Zapier can automate that for us.Īirtable is a database spreadsheet hybrid that helps with all things organization. Organizing these efforts takes a lot of communication, and it can be challenging to stay on top of it all, especially as a resource-constrained nonprofit. Yesterday, TogetherSF volunteers delivered 35,000 steaks to Bay Area food banks. In New York City, Backpacks for the Street has shared 1,200 COVID-19 prevention kits with residents experiencing homelessness. Team Rubicon has distributed hundreds of thousands of masks and gloves to healthcare workers in Colorado. ![]() Rogers’ advice to look for the helpers right now, we will find them. A Twilio x DEV Hackathon submission for Engaging Engagements and/or Interesting Integrations.Īutomating volunteer reminder texts for COVID-19 community response teams Helping COVID-19 community response teams coordinate neighbors helping neighbors.
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