Jotform + Airtable integration overview

if you're looking for a way to integrate your jot form directly to an airtable database look no further than this video i'm going to be going into detail about this exact process and make sure you stay until the end because i'm going to be going into an advanced use case that shows where this tends to break down and how you can overcome any hurdles that you might have so if that's of interest stick around and let's get into it hey my name is gareth pronovost i'm the owner at gap consulting where we help you to organize and automate your business and life if that's of interest and you want to learn more about that check out below the description of this video there will be a link to my youtube channel where you can learn more about what we do but without further ado let's just jump into this particular video we're talking about integrating jotform directly with airtable where it works where it doesn't and how to overcome it so let's go ahead and pop right into my screen here and you'll see that i've already built together a pretty decent jotform here now quick sidebar i personally use jotform to run our business we love jotform and there are a lot of instances where an advanced form software like this is absolutely necessary so one of those particular instances might be in collecting information up front when you're trying to generate leads for your business in this example i've built a really fake obviously lead gen form i'm asking for a name i'm asking for them to identify their pain point i'm asking how many things they need and what their favorite ice cream is you probably have different criteria that you use to generate leads or qualify leads in your business but i'll leave that up to you my big point here is to showcase that there are different types of data that jotform is able of capturing and can be put into airtable nicely now the first thing you'll want to do before you do anything about integrating or setting up how this form is going to be delivered to airtable is make sure that you have in air table the parts that you need in order to collect this information so here i've built the form i'm in build mode on my form i created a new form and i added these fields right you probably know this already but you can just drag and drop all these elements and you can get fancier with this if you so choose you can change the formatting you see i added a logo up at the top you've got all sorts of formatting and and cool options available to you for building your form but i'm going to assume that you've already reached this point and now you need to tie it up nicely with your airtable database so first and foremost you have to make sure that your database has the ability to take those data points in so i've built those fields in this database i have a first name i have a last name i have a description field and specifically this captures a kind of data called long text i have a number field here where we're entering in that uh that second to last question and then i have a single select field which is capturing the favorite ice cream and so we're going to go ahead and find a way to match the jot form directly into this database so once you've built the form and the database and airtable your next step then is to go into the integration section of the form so head on over to your settings panel on your form and come down to the integrations on the left side of your screen and you'll see a list of all the different software that jotform currently has integrations with and we are looking for airtable so you can either search it search for it in the search tab or you can just uh scroll down until you find it and we are going to need to provide our air table api key now this is of course a private key you don't want to share this with anybody but in order to get it flip back into your airtable database in the upper right corner you can see your account settings click on the account icon and go to your account this will open up in a new tab and right here grayed out is going to be your api key now once you drop your cursor in there the key becomes visible i'm going to have to keep mine blurred out for privacy reasons but this is where you will just do a copy so ctrl c or apple c and then you can close this tab out and pop back into jotform and just go ahead and control v or apple v and paste that key right in here you'll know that you have the right airtable api key because it will begin with key go ahead and authenticate from there and it's going to ask you which of your airtable bases you want to connect to now i am in air table all the time so i have quite a few bases to scroll through so i'm just going to go ahead and start scrolling and see if i can't find this database it's called base number one if you're not familiar with how these bases are named you can tell right here by clicking on your database it's whatever name you've given it right here so we'll go ahead and select that base and now it's going to ask what table in air table we want to write the data to so let's flip back one more time into air table and we only have one table here we have a table called form responses so this is where i want to send this and of course it should come as no surprise that that's the only option available to me now if you have a more complicated database set up you're going to have a lot of options here so make sure you pick the right table that you want to write the data to and now we need to start matching our fields so this is where we're going to say this is the piece that came from air table and or this is this is rather the field in air table and we're going to need to connect it or map it to the form response in jot form so i've got a first name field in their table and of course that is going to be matched to my name field and i want to add another field let's skip last name and i'm going to run right down to description and the description field in air table is where we want the the long text where they tell us about their problem so i can add that so again on the left hand side here this is the name of the field or the column in air table number of things and on the right side it is the name of the question in jotform how many things and lastly i have my single select field of favorite ice cream and there we go so you'll notice that i've only mapped four different things the name the description the number of things and the favorite ice cream now this is going to break down a little bit because when we ask for the name we are getting one long string we're getting the first and the last name combined and my airtable database was built with the first name and the last name as two separate field types so if we go ahead and save this and we create a new record when the submission is edited this by the way is a an option for you if somebody edits their submission after the fact you can decide whether or not you want to create a new record an air table based on that action i'll disable this and i'm going to go ahead and save this and complete the integration now from here we can just open up our form and i'm going to open it in a new tab i'm going to put in some information now once that is submitted we should pop into our airtable base and we see that that was exactly put into our database as planned so again the only caveat here is that we broke our first and last name out into two separate places but other than that everything is coming in properly so do know that some forms some field types in your form you're gonna have to go in and make sure that it shows up in your database as expected an easy work around here is to just create a full name field from jotform and i could write the entire name here and then i could build formulas in air table that break that out right so i could put all of the name in one place and then break out a first and last name using some fancy formulas but the long story short is that this direct integration happens practically instantly and it'll bring that data in directly now sometimes you're going to come against a more advanced use case this happens when you have multiple tables in airtable that are collecting your data and you want to make sure that you're correctly parsing that data out for example we might have our contacts in one table and all of the form submissions that link to those contacts in a separate table this is especially useful when in airtable you're building out additional workflows from this so for example if you start working on projects for your contacts and then you invoice those contacts you're going to want to build out all of the separate tables and connect them appropriately but you still want to make sure that your form is getting captured appropriately without creating data over and over again for example if joe schmo is already in your database you don't want to add them again you're going to have duplicate copy so how do you get around this and how do you talk to two or more tables at the same time with the automation well my favorite solution for this is actually to go outside of the direct integration and to start working with a platform called zapier now zapier if you're not familiar with it is a third-party tool that connects a lot of things on the internet it is not the only solution that does this you can also use tools like integromat etc if you're familiar with them or more comfortable with them but i'm going to show you an advanced use case using a web hook how we can take that form submission and talk to multiple tables all at once so let's go ahead and jump back into my screen here and we're going to use the same example but this time when this form is submitted going back into settings we're going to set up an integration with a web hook so we go in here and we can search this time for webhook and we see that jotform has this nice little thing already ready for us so we're going to say that when this form receives a new submission that is going to trigger this webhook to pass information to our automated process and so we can go ahead and in here and it's there is no web hook currently established so we need to go into zapier or whatever third-party integration tool you're using to make this web hook work for us so i'm going to pop into zapier here and i'm going to make a new zap and my trigger event is going to be a web hook by zapier now this does require that you're on a paid plan for zapier as well but this more advanced use case is going to give you so much more functionality that it really is worth it in most cases so i'm going to choose an event and i'm going to choose to roll with the catch hook and i'm going to continue here and this catch hook is automatically created for me by zapier if you uh want to make changes to these default modes that is enable to respond with an empty body or pick off a child key you can i'm going to go ahead and copy this url and i need to go back into my jot form and i'm going to drop that url into my web hook i click add new web hook and complete integration takes just a moment but now when a new form is submitted that web hook is going to be triggered so let's now pop into our form and pass example data one more time so i'm going to open up my form again and i'm going to send in some more sample information now as soon as that happens zapier is going to get alerted that a new form was submitted so i can pop now into zapier and i can test out this trigger and we see all of this information right here is the information that was just submitted in that form and so all of that data was passed into zapier and we can now use it in additional automation steps again this is a more advanced use case for writing to multiple tables the native integration between jotform and airtable works beautifully if you're writing to one table i would recommend absolutely just using that but in our example now that we have all this data in our web hook we can now build a more advanced automation from the form submission that takes this data and puts it into multiple places within an airtable database [Music] hey

Channel: Jotform

Views: 7,184

Keywords: jotform airtable integration, airtable integration, airtable forms, airtable form integration, jotform how to, best form builder, contact form, easy form builder, form builder, form software, how to use jotform, jot form, jotform integration, jotform tips, jotform tutorial, jotform, online form builder, payment form, productivity, registration form, website form, airtable, airtable consulting, airtable tutorial, gareth pronovost, lead generation form, airtable database

Id: rgKmy971J24

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2021