This year, Airtable’s Commemorative Observance team is excited to wrap up Pride Month by sharing the stories of two amazing organizations out there powered by Airtable: CMFD Consulting and For Them.
CMFD Consulting and For Them are two organizations spearheaded by LGBTQIA2+ leaders. We interviewed Chloe Freeman (they/them), CEO at For Them, and Chris Dancy (they/them) at CMFD Consulting about their work, what Pride Month means to them, and how they’re using Airtable.
For Them Spotlight
Tell us more about For Them.
For Them is a wellness company built by and for the queer community. Our mission is to redefine what it means to truly be “well.” By taking a microscope to queerness and the experiences of queer and gender-expansive folx (an alternate spelling of "folks" that promotes inclusion of marginalized groups), we are able to offer products that make folx feel truly euphoric, offer services that allow folx to feel empowered and build communities.
How does your organization use Airtable?
Airtable has been the backbone of our business operations from a team of 1 to a team of 10. It enabled us to have total control over our customer journey from day one, which empowered us to test and iterate quickly without any coding or development expertise. This has been absolutely invaluable and allowed us to stay very close to the systems and processes. This translates to customer insight and intimacy in an invaluable way for our particular business model.
We used Airtable for the 0 to 1 stage with our physical product, The Binder, to manage inventory and as the back-end to a sales funnel we were running out of Typeform.
Before we transitioned to a 3PL (read: when we were still packing and posting out of my apartment!) our entire distribution was operating out of Airtable. As we scale, we are using more custom scripts within the Automations functionality as this is the glue between our 3PL, e-commerce front-end, payment provider and our comms software.
Airtable is still the linchpin SaaS for our customer journey, both for our physical and digital product—The Binder and The Membership. It is the back-end for our Webflow website and the front-end for our team. It has enabled us to structure our own CRM so we can gather insight and build intimate relationships with our community, which is at the heart of everything we do.
We used the linked records, roll-ups and count functionality with the e-commerce data to create dashboards for our sales and paid media analytics. The fact we can be so flexible using conditional filtering to manipulate the sales data is really important for us.
Our latest exciting Airtable system is an automated media scheduling system. We are managing all the content in Airtable as a hybrid between a creator database and media scheduler for our new digital offering—The Membership—which is broadcasting out of Discord.
What does Pride Month mean to you?
Pride Month quite literally puts queerness and queer joy at the center. It’s a time to celebrate who we are—how far our community has come and all of the sheer magic we possess just by living in our truths.
And on that note it’s important for me to recognize, it can also be a time of mixed emotion for many folx in our community who perhaps, for whatever reason, aren’t out, are struggling to accept themselves or maybe have struggled with their identities for a long time.
I think it’s important to remember that the road isn’t always magic and rainbows—it takes a lot of bravery to live in your truth… and some folx that choose to be out, pay a price for it. I think this is what makes pride month really special for our community. We all show up as we are and we hold space for each other—it’s a time to look around and see how much love and support exists for us.
CMFD Consulting Spotlight
Tell us more about CMFD Consulting.
I’ve been a solo technology consultant for nearly a decade. I focus on helping enterprises and organizations design no-code solutions that focus specifically on mutual aid or employment empowerment.
I'm known as the world's most connected person, and have strived to create more equitable, mindful, and kind systems for organizations as large as Microsoft and as wide as Coca-Cola.
Two years ago, I started DareTable after having a video from 2018 go viral about my Airtable system. DareTable did bespoke no-code consulting. During that time, I began to broaden my relationship with the Airtable community by focusing on events for Airtable professionals. I like to say, DareTable is a movement to challenge Airtable customers to innovate beyond bespoke business challenges and change lives and hearts.
What drew you to Airtable?
Airtable empowers my business in so many ways it’s hard to really focus on one. At its core, Airtable is a launching pad for all the corresponding data, systems, and processes related to my core business unit but spreads out to support my customers.
My normal processes, such as HR/ Accounting / CRM / Biz Dev, are in my system. Still, it goes beyond that to manage the health and wellbeing of my team, control our assets, and event define and chart our values.
At its core, the platform I designed powers all the systems I use for my customers, everything from Black Speakers Collective to the platform that enabled us to have the first-ever in-person Airtable event in 2022 in Austin, Texas.
What does Pride Month mean to you?
Pride has meant many things to me over the 35 years I have been out of the closet.
To me, Pride is a way of being in the world. Pride means thinking about the community before self, legacy over trends, and activism before acceptance. So much has changed since my first Pride March on Washington, D.C. in 1993 to almost 2023, but the one thing that hasn’t is the relentless focus on always being more inclusive and open to all people.
As a LGBTQAI business owner and community member, I think it’s critically important to focus relentlessly on how much generational trauma many of our community members are dealing with daily.
No amount of diversity training or acceptance erases decades of education people have regarding the community. Combine that with the backlash happening now in some states and the level of acceptance and safety seems to be challenging for many. It's hard, and underscores the importance of creating systems to help keep people accountable and make it easy and safe for people to capture, report, and understand when safety isn’t made a priority.