A New Way of Life Reentry Project promotes healing, power, and opportunity for formerly incarcerated people. They provide safe housing, pro bono legal services, and career support, while also working to change laws and policies to eliminate mass incarceration. We’re working with them to improve their internal data systems and workflows in order to make their work more efficient and impactful.
When we first began working with A New Way of Life in 2021, their disconnected, manual workflows seemed to be a strong candidate for migration to a CRM. Once we conducted our discovery and met the team, however, we came to realize that a traditional CRM wouldn’t be a good fit for A New Way of Life, because they have different teams and different locations working with the same data, but in different ways. Moreover, their workflows were highly specialized, so there wasn’t anything “out-of-the-box” that would work, and their teams were accustomed to the flexibility of working with spreadsheets that they could change and adapt as needed. To strike a balance between the need to share information and data structures between teams and the need to retain flexibility and independence, we settled on using Airtable to track the data which was currently scattered in spreadsheets. We worked with their team to understand their needs, then migrated key information into a flexible Airtable base that closely followed the structures of their spreadsheets. Airtable let us keep what was working about the spreadsheets, while the familiar spreadsheet-like interface was easy for staff to adopt. Additionally, Airtable’s inherent flexibility allowed their in-house technology super-users to update fields and reports independently, which was key for keeping the system affordable and responsible.
Airtable isn’t always the best solution for centralizing a nonprofit’s working data, but in A New Way of Life’s case it struck the right balance of flexibility, low cost, and ease of use. We worked with their team to configure and launch their inaugural Airtable base, and we’ve been providing training, troubleshooting, and additional configuration support ever since. There may come a day when it makes sense for A New Way of Life to migrate to a more structured, purpose-built database, but if we get there Airtable will have been a valuable bridging platform, and helpful working prototype. Or, Airtable may continue to be the right platform for them indefinitely—either way, we’re proud to support their work!