Using Make to send events from Calendly to Airtable

[ScottWorld]

Using Make.com to send data from a Calendly event to Airtable can be a little bit tricky, because of how Calendly’s API sends data to external apps.

Calendly allows a maximum of 10 questions & answers per event, and it simply sends those questions & answers in an array that is ordered based on the order of your questions within the Calendly event. And the key for each item in the array is simply the “position number” of the question.

What that means is that if you change the order of your questions in Calendly, your automated scenario will mostly likely break, so be careful to not change the order of your questions in Calendly. (Alternatively, you could likely build your scenario in a more complex way that searches through the text of your questions to figure out where your desired question’s answer exists in the array).

There are several different ways to map your data from Calendly into Airtable.

Below is one way that I like, because the scenario automatically adjusts itself based on the addition or removal of questions. (However, note that removing a question from the middle of your questions or adding a question into the middle of your questions would change the “position number” of the questions that come afterwards.)

Here’s the overall scenario:

Here’s where I iterate through the array of questions and answers:

I automatically set variables with the answers. The name of each variable is the “position number” of the question. So the variable names will be “1”, “2”, “3”, etc.

Here’s where I get the variables that were previously set. If the variable doesn’t exist because the questions didn’t get as high as that number, it’s okay:

And then, you can just map the variables into your Airtable fields. You’ll even see that I have some splitting happening here. Those were multiple choice answers in Calendly (checkbox fields) where the person could select more than one answer. Those come in with “line breaks” from Calendly, but using the “Split” function turns those answers into comma-separated strings, so I can easily insert them into multiple select fields in Airtable.

There are many other ways of sending Calendly events to Airtable, too! Please feel free your “Calendly to Airtable” solutions below!

[ben]

Great tutorial! I have been rebuilding my CRM using Make.com instead of Zapier & came across the same issues with the Questions/Responses to the 10 custom fields. This was for a tutorial for my YouTube channel. If you care to watch the unedited version, here is the loom version. I am thinking of titling this “Watch me struggle to connect Calendly to Airtable using Make.com for 41 minutes”

I preferred the way Zapier handled this, but pushed through the make scenario and eventually got it to work. Here is how I did it:

One thing I found interesting was not all of the event details were passed in “Watch Events”, so I too had to “Get event”

then, for the custom fields, here is how I mapped them in

I am tired of worrying about changing the order of the questions, so I am making my Airtable crm dynamic enough to just enable zapier to map into question 1/2/3/10 & answer 1/2/3/10 fields. I will just use rollups strategically to bring these fields to the right locations.

I did have one question/struggle. I wanted my last step to run last, but it was one of the first steps I created. To get it to run in order, I had to duplicate a step that way it would run last, is there a different way of doing it to make a certain step run last regardless of at what point the building process you created it?

[ScottWorld]

Thank you so much for posting this excellent Calendly/Make solution, @ben!

Your solution might even be simpler & more straightforward than mine!

@ben

I did have one question/struggle. I wanted my last step to run last, but it was one of the first steps I created. To get it to run in order, I had to duplicate a step that way it would run last, is there a different way of doing it to make a certain step run last regardless of at what point the building process you created it?

Yes, you can move modules around in any order that you want. You just need to unlink them by right-clicking on the path, and then relink them by dragging.

You can even make a different module the very first module by dragging the little lightning bolt icon (which is sometimes a clock icon) onto a different module.

And the order that paths get followed after a router are determined by the order that you can connect the paths in.

You can click on the “magic wand” icon in the bottom toolbar to BOTH cleanup the scenario AND rearrange the paths in the order that Make will follow.

I just created a new Loom video for you to show off some basic navigation tips in Make.com:

[ben]

That is perfect! And thank you so much for the loom video. Lots of great tips. What do you normally suggest for triggering from Airtable? Triggering every 1 minute would use lots of operations, no?

Traditionally in Zapier I trigger off a new record in a view, and on my plan it triggers every 2 minutes. In Zapier, I do not get charged a task/operation every two minutes however. Is that a cost to eat in make, or is there a better way?

[ScottWorld]

Make has 2 types of triggers:

1. Instant triggers: These will instantly fire when something takes place. Instant triggers don’t use up extra operations because they will only fire when something actually happened. If you look at Make’s list of Airtable triggers, you’ll see that both triggers are instant. So you can choose to watch records (either new records or updated records) or watch new form entries. For watching updated records, this is based on a modified time field in Airtable, so you can set it (in Airtable) to only be watching specific fields.

2. Scheduled triggers: Almost everything else in Make can be put on a schedule. These will take up extra operations if nothing happens while it is polling for changes, but operations are super cheap in Make. Make is significantly less expensive than Zapier.

While you’re working in Make, you can move whatever module you want to begin your scenario by moving it to the left of everything else (i.e. nothing should be connecting to its left), and then dragging that little clock / lightning bolt icon to the first module. That’s another way to tell if that module is an “instant trigger” or a “scheduled trigger”, because the icon will change between a clock & a lightning bolt icon. (Although note that even instant triggers can be scheduled, if you have a need to “delay” the instant from not happening so instantaneously. Lol.)

Webhooks & mailhooks are also instant triggers, so I will often start my Make automations by having an Airtable automation trigger a Make webhook. You could do this by just having somebody click on a link that triggers the webhook (which will open up a webhook response page in a different tab), but I like to hide the magic behind a Javascript that controls it. I wrote up another post below on how to do that:

Sending Airtable data to an external webhook (such as Make.com)

If you’d like to trigger a webhook in an external service (such as my favorite automation tool Make.com), you can easily do this by creating a formula field or a button field that combines the webhook URL + any parameters that you want to send to the webhook. So, for example, if your webhook URL is https://your_webhook_address.com, and you want to send it your RecordID, you would create a formula field or a button field with a formula that looks like this: "https://your_webhook_address.com?Rec…

So for me, I will most frequently do the webhook method of triggering my scenarios.

[Oglesbeard]

Is Make a rebrand of Integromat?

[ScottWorld]

Yes. They rebranded it in February 2022.

In my personal opinion, I don’t know if it was such great idea from an SEO perspective. According to the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which includes over 560 million words from various sources such as spoken language, fiction, and news, the word “make” is ranked as the 5th most common verb in American English, after “be”, “have”, “do”, and “say”.

I just had a call with Make today, and they were complaining about not being able to rank highly in search results on Google, YouTube, etc. Yet all of us Certified Make Consultants warned them about this a year ago.

However, on the positive side, Make is a much more friendly & inviting word than the highly-technical word Integromat! I think that once people actually discover Make, they may not be as intimidated by that platform as a platform called “Integromat”.