Capturing and fulfilling content requests can get chaotic fast—from logging important details, to tracking progress, to keeping stakeholders informed. With Airtable, you can streamline your entire pipeline, from request to delivery.
In this guide, you’ll learn step-by-step how to manage your team’s content requests in Airtable. Follow along to customize your content calendar template for your specific needs.
You’ll learn how to:
① Easily capture requests along with every key detail
② Review, approve, and assign content to your team
③ Automatically keep your stakeholders informed of progress
Capture requests from anyone
Concepts covered: form
New requests for content can come from multiple channels, at any time. Instead of wading through direct messages, email threads, and docs, stop the back-and-forth by streamlining your process with a customizable form.
With a form, you can standardize new requests and capture all the context you need to start working immediately. Collect information from anyone and save it automatically to your new content calendar base.
→ Your Content pipeline table comes with a form ready for you and your team to start capturing new requests. To explore your form, navigate to the New content request form in the views sidebar on the upper left corner of your base.
1. Customize your content request form
You can update this prebuilt form anytime from this form builder—a customizable, drag and drop editable version of your form that gives you a preview of what form submitters see once it’s shared.
Forms are scoped to the table they are created in—so when a request is submitted to the New content request form, it will collect and populate in the Content pipeline table, right alongside existing content in your pipeline. The fields available to use in your form are also based on all of the fields in this table.
→ Try making this form your own! Adjust the field order by clicking on a field and dragging with the drag handle. Then, edit the display name and help text of each field—just double-click on the field to customize it.
You can also hide fields or make fields visible by dragging and dropping to or from the list on the left side of the form builder. To make a field required, select the field and enable the Required toggle in the top right corner.
2. Share your form with important stakeholders—anywhere
Now that you’ve adjust the form to fit your team’s needs, it’s time to start taking requests! With access to this single link, anyone you want can submit requests directly into your Content pipeline table—no need for them to sign in to Airtable.
→ To share your form, select Share form on the view bar. This will generate a unique URL for your form, which you can copy and send to anyone you want. You can also click Open form to preview how your form will look for your submitters.
Approve and assign
You’ve shared your request form and now new requests are being submitted in your Content pipeline table! It’s time to take action on these requests by reviewing and assigning each request to your content team.
When requests are submitted to your New content request form, they’re given a Requested status, since this field is required in the form.
→ Check out the Requests grid view to explore newly submitted requests.
1. Review and approve new requests
As requests come in, you can update and add information directly in the Requests grid view. To easily see and review all the information in the request at a glance, try viewing each in an expanded record, which will also show you the time the request was submitted and other activity.
→ To update and add information to a request, select each field you’d like to update. Try adding a date in the Due date field, assign to a content lead in the Creator field, and then change the Status from Requested to Approved in the single-select dropdown.
2. Triage approved requests to your team
You’ve reviewed and assigned content to the creators on your team, and now it’s time for your creators to take action. Make sure each creator stays informed with a view that automatically surfaces just their projects by creating a custom filtered view.
→ Try creating a new view for one of your teammates from the view sidebar on the upper left side in your Content pipeline table. Use the Filter button on the view bar to filter down to show only one teammate’s projects.
Repeat this process for each of your content leads to create clarity across your entire team—now when you approve new requests, they’ll instantly land on the right teammate’s list of projects.
Track and share progress
You’ve triaged content to your content leads, and they’re hard at work creating amazing content—but now your requesters are asking for an update. As your content moves through production, you can automatically keep your stakeholders up to date with requester-specific views and custom notifications.
Give each requester visibility into only their requests by creating them their own view. Similar to creating a view for every content lead to stay on top of their projects, you can create transparency for stakeholder’s by creating a view that surfaces only their requests.
→ Create a view that filters by the Requested by field, or any other set of criteria you want to share with a stakeholder.
1. Give stakeholders a real-time view of their requests
Once you’ve set up a custom view for a relevant stakeholder, share it with them so they can keep an eye on their requests in real time.
→ To share your requester’s view, you have a couple of options. You can invite your requester as a collaborator in your base by clicking the Share button in the top right of your base. Or you can share the view externally without inviting anyone directly to your base. Click the Share view button on the view bar to create a custom link that anyone can use—without needing to sign into Airtable.
Visitors to a shared view link will see only what information is visible in this particular view. If you’ve filtered out records or hidden fields, those parts of your base, as well as other tables, won’t be visible. And the link refreshes every time it’s visited—so your updates are always shared in real time.
2. Send customized notifications, automatically
As content moves through production, it’s hard to keep every requester informed at every step. With Automations, you can create custom rules that run automatically—just choose a trigger and a corresponding action and then let your automation do all the work.
Create your own custom notifications that keep all your stakeholders in the loop, at each step of production. As the request moves through the pipeline, automatically send a notification email to the stakeholder who requested it.
→ To get started exploring automation, navigate to the Automations button in the top right corner. Check out our guide to setting up custom notifications to learn more.
Nice work!
You’ve taken three key steps to managing your content requests in Airtable:
✓ First, you customized a content request form to capture requests right into your pipeline.
✓ Next, you reviewed, approved, and assigned requests all in one place.
✓ Finally, you gave your stakeholders real-time updates on the status of their requests.
With your new content request form, your team can spend less time wrangling details and more time delivering on content. From request submission to final delivery, you’re now powering your entire content pipeline, all in one place.