Airtable Advanced Startup Fundraising CRM

The advanced startup fundraising CRM that scales as you round up. Built in Airtable. This template is for you if you are looking to raise money for your venture and don't have a system yet.

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Systematically expanding your database of contacts and interactions can significantly increase your chances of quickly raising money for your venture at any stage. This happened to one of my clients, who suggested I create a template of this system so that as many founders and entrepreneurs as possible can benefit from it without having to worry about building the technical infrastructure required to run an effective system.

Key components

1. Contacts: individuals who are part of your network and who you want to store on your table and interact with. Contacts can also be visualized in a “pipeline” (kanban) view as they go through multiple stages in the investment journey and you contact and follow up with them. There are two main pipelines (funnels) in the Fundraising CRM: one for the “primary status” of contacts - that is, whether they are approved for outreach, to keep for later, or not a fit from the start; and one for “funnel status” - the status you use in the outreach pipeline once a contact’s “primary status” is “approved”. These statuses are designed to follow a two-step screening process so that you can upload contacts in bulk (or outsource that task), and then screen them for approval. Once a contact is approved, you can start the outreach process.
2. Companies: groups of individuals stored in your “Contacts” table. Each Company can have multiple Contacts associated with it. Companies have specific focus areas and locations.
3. Interactions: meetings, emails, and any touch point with Contacts. Each Interaction is linked to one/multiple Contact(s). You can visualize Interactions in a calendar view, as well as grouped by “type” (e.g., meeting, call, email) and by Contact.
4. Wiki: the central repository for templates, SOPs, files, and any relevant document for your fundraising journey - so that everyone in the team can optimize their workflow within the system. This is the place where you can store internal SOP (standard operating procedures), email templates for outreach at different stages, pitch deck files, and more useful documentation.

Automation & Interfaces

1. Automate follow-up reminders: this Airtable automation has a simple trigger and one action. When a record enters a view (i.e., “Funnel Followup”), send an email to the Contact Owner, reminding them to follow up with the contact and updating the data in the Fundraising CRM accordingly. You can freely customize the email subject/body, or leave it as is.
2. Update the status of a contact to “No Response”: this Airtable automation triggers when a contact matches a specific condition: there are more than 3 Interactions and the last interaction happened more than 4 days ago and the funnel status is still “Material Sent”. In this Airtable Fundraising CRM, such conditions are implied to mean the investor is not interested at the moment, and the Funnel status is moved to “No Response” as a consequence. You can freely customize the number of interactions or timespan from the last interaction directly in the automation.
3. Interfaces bring it all together: a central “dashboard” getting data from your Airtable Fundraising CRM and displaying it in graphs and aggregated high-level numbers that can inform your decisions moving forward. You can access the included Interface from the dedicated “Interfaces” tab at the top center of the Airtable Base. Some analytics included in the Interface are “Total Investors”, “Total Amount Invested”, “Interactions by type”, “Amount invested by contact owner”, and more.