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.
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
- Airtable web clipper extension
- Airtable base with a table called “Events”
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!
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
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.
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
3. I generate the newsletter text as a
Insert records as List configuration
4. Which then generates a Google Doc
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.
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.
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
Thanks
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