Being a global-focused non-profit, Global Citizen Year coordinates a veritable mountain of tasks, statuses, and the people behind both. With Airtable as a central hub for many of the contact points and processes in their setup, it became necessary to set up some in-depth integrations to do most of the heavy lifting. One top priority was to be able to send information from Airtable to other tools with the click of a button (or toggling of a checkbox). Unfortunately, the vanilla Zapier-Airtable connector was either extremely complicated in some cases, or simply wasn’t meeting their needs, so the team began looking for additional help on the Airtable community.

Searching for their specific use case, the team at Global Citizen Year found Openside via the Airtable community and quickly assessed the capabilities of the library of tools offered. With the On2Air tools in their setup, they were able to build their desired workflows with Airtable + their tech stack in a variety of complex integrations, in the end both simplifying and expanding what they were already doing.

In addition to being able to send data out of Airtable with ease, the team at Global Citizen Year have been utilizing the other features of the Openside tools. The “find and update” function has saved the trouble of creating numerous repeat steps in a Zap (traditional Zapier approach). This and many others have become time-savers for their everyday operations. As a small-but-expanding non-profit, time is one of their most precious commodities, and putting the right automations with Openside in place has freed them to focus on what they do best.

With as big a vision as they had, the founders of The Founder City Project had to face many of the same concerns they were helping people with: finding the time to follow through on projects, having the confidence to scale in the way they wanted to, and finding the right partnerships to make the group thrive.Many of the concerns they had were related to their backend tech (which included Airtable, among other things), and the workflows needed to grow without dropping momentum or missing important details. It was during this growth period that founder Ben Baldwin began seeking additional help from the Airtable community, and found some extremely helpful comments made by Openside founder Dan Fellars. It was these clear explanations and helpful tips that led Baldwin to search out more of Openside’s offerings, and quickly found the solutions he was looking for.

From the beginning, Baldwin knew that there were things he didn’t know when setting up his workflows and scaling. From day one working with Fellars and the Openside team, Baldwin quickly acquired real-world wisdom on effective systems to set up and maintain, and added powerful tools to his tech stack in the form of the On2Air library. Both were instrumental in helping The Founder City Project take the direction they wanted with a solid backend to support it.

With Openside on The Founder City Project’s roster of support, the Project’s workflow capabilities skyrocketed. The On2Air tools augmented their systems and allowed previously complicated and time consuming workflows to be made simple. This, combined with the constant assurance of having automation experts in their corner, is what led Baldwin to describe Openside as “a trusted advisor and one of my most important business relationships.” He additionally points out that “there’s no way my business would be where it is without [the Openside team’s] skills, dependability, humility, and most important: [their] patience. Whenever I get a bill from Openside, it’s money well-spent. In fact, I think it’s a marker that tracks my progress.”