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How I used Airtable to automate a successful newsletter

Every month, I, Steven Zhang, save hours using these automations to help write my Boston Climate Tech events newsletter which is read by over 1,300 subscribers.
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Here’s how I do it
Step
Status Quo (without automation)
How I automate
1. Gathering events
Manually copy-paste events into a substack drafts post or text file (30min)
Clip events using webclipper (15min)
2. Generating newsletter
Manual copy paste and rewrite each event in the newsletter (30min)
Autogenerate (10min)

Prequiquisites

  1. Airtable web clipper extension
  1. Airtable base with a table called “Events”
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Step 1. Gathering events

The first step to automating the newsletter is to collect the events data (unstructured) into an Airtable base (structured data)

Status quo (30min)

The manual way of gathering events would be to copy paste text manually into a text editor
Do this 20 times and the time costs really add up!
Manually copy-pasting events
Manually copy-pasting events
 
Automation (15min)
To automate most of this, I open my Chrome bookmark folder list of 20+ different websites that may have open climate tech events, and then start clipping using Airtable webclipper
This allows fast collation of event title and URL. Text descriptions are too unpredictably structured for me but if the event listings you’re copying all follow the same predictable structure (say, you’re clipping only Eventbrite events), you can use CSS selectors to select the text
Automating event gathering using Airtable web clipper
Automating event gathering using Airtable web clipper
 
Step 2. Generating the newsletter
Once I have all the events in the newsletter, I also automate the newsletter generation using an Airtable Automation to turn the structured Airtable into a well-formatted newsletter. Without automation, this would take an additional 30 minutes to manually edit each event task

Automation (10min)

1. Since the event data is now in a structured Airtable base I can implement the following automation.
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2. The [automation] for weekly digest view filters events that are happening in the next X weeks, where X is the interval until my following newsletter
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3. I generate the newsletter text as a Insert records as List configuration
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4. Which then generates a Google Doc
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5. I copy the Google Doc into the sSbstack editor and my newsletter is now complete, short of a few manual formatting actions like increasing the font size of each event header and adding intro text.
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Conclusion

There you have it- using Airtable & automation to shorten hours off of my newsletter writing

Bonus

Some other extra automations/tricks that I do using Airtable for this newsletter

Calendar view

Since the Airtable base has a structured data format, I also offer a calendar view, live grid view, and iCal feed to my newsletter readers which my readers rave about.
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You can check it out live here.

Using a linked table to model event location

Since event locations are often repeated, I use a linked table Location to lookup Address to save time
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Thanks

By the way, these are the types of systems that we build for business operations teams all the time! You can schedule a free 30-minute call with us by filling out this form.
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