HOW TO STAY MOTIVATED READING BY USING AN AIRTABLE DATABASE

This week we travel back to Abilene, Texas to visit with Hannah Wiginton from Season 4 Episode 12. Hannah works as the Communications and Grants Director for New Horizons which is an organization that helps children in foster care. She helps plan fundraisers, does marketing, and most importantly writes grants to ensure they receive funding to continue to provide the amazing services they offer.

The organization Hannah works for helps children of all ages, from birth to 17 to receive the treatment and services they need to make sure their physical, emotional, and attachment needs are met. They also train foster families on the proper ways to open their homes up to these children. Hannah says the work is extremely rewarding and loves seeing the transformation the kids go through as they come and go from the organization.

In addition to her work at New Horizons, Hannah is also a web designer. For the past 10 years, Hannah has worked with smaller clients to launch their own websites and even get started with marketing their site on social media. Hannah has always loved learning new tools and software and enjoys these freelance jobs on the side.

Hannah came across Airtable while conducting one too many google searches. She quickly fell in love with the tool because of its awesome ability to be a relational database. Her first base was a plant tracker database that she used to manage her new landscape project that she was working on. This base really showed Hannah all the different things that are possible within Airtable. Since this base, she has started using Airtable to manage tons of personal use cases and has even gotten her husband to start tracking things along with her.

DEMO: Book Tracker Base

Books Table that has fields for the title, book cover, author, status of if she has read it, genre, synopsis, the date the book was read, owned/borrowed, personal rating, personal review and more
Different views in the Books table to see books read by year, a gallery view to look at books in a visual way, just like a library on your computer of what you’ve read
Author Table: linked to Author in Books table. Shows if she has a preference to a specific author
Status & Genre Tables are linked back to the books table to allow for better metrics
Metrics Table: Counts how many books she has of each other and the total number of books, and even the total number of words
Helps her stay committed to reading and makes it fun

We love seeing Hannah’s passion for the work that she does as well as her passion for Airtable. Her Book Tracker base in Airtable Universe has 876 base copies so it is clear that other users are enjoying her work with the tool as well.

Learn more about New Horizons

See Hannah’s website & portfolio

Grab a copy of Hannah’s Book Tracker base from the Airtable Universe

Watch the video below for the full podcast visual, including more of Hannah’s story and the live walkthroughs of the bases described above.