Creating a booking availability view on your website with Airtable
This blog post is part of a series on running a cohort/peer group booking system for your membership. Further posts coming soon.
Are you running cohort or peer group-based programming for your membership? If so, you may have wondered how to manage those groups in an efficient way. A number of platforms that you might already use (like Eventbrite or AddEvent) don’t quite suit the needs of a cohort-based system, and you might find yourself making compromises around what you want your system to look like.
In this post (and the following series), I’ll be running through how to create your own custom member booking system using no-code tools - primarily a tool called Airtable (which will look and feel familiar if you’ve ever used a spreadsheet).
Putting session availability on the web
The first step towards getting a booking system set up is simply to post the options to your website (or member platform). Now, you could manually set up the options directly in your website-builder, but setting up the right layout and formatting can be tedious, especially if you need to make edits later. In addition, it’s harder to add additional functionality later (like automatically updated space availability, which I’ll talk about in a later post).
Instead, by using Airtable, we can set up a simple spreadsheet of availability, and have that data viewable on any website or platform that allows embedding, in a simple view - just like this:
Tutorial to create your own
In order to set up your availability view, you’ll need an account with Airtable (it’s free). You don’t necessarily need a website, as the availability can be shared directly through Airtable (see this example), however, it looks much more appealing when embedded on a website.
Many website builders have the ability to embed code - here are help articles for Squarespace and Wordpress. And, if you use a membership platform, they may also offer this option - e.g. here are articles for Mighty Networks and Circle.
Once you’re ready, check out the video below for a step-by-step tutorial:
