1. Projects
  2. Circles scheduling

Turning a manual, multi-tab Circles setup into a one-step workflow.

At Modern Health I produced online workshops and webinars called Circles. Setup took hours across many tools, so I mapped the process and automated it with Zapier and Airtable.

Org
Modern Health
Role
Creative Producer
Tools
Zapier, Airtable, Zendesk, Zoom, Google Slides
SecondsWas hours of setup
DozensZapier and Airtable automations here
150+Automations across Modern Health projects
ProducerStill sends every email

Figures, client names and internal details are left out.

The problem

I was a creative producer at Modern Health, running online workshops and webinars called Circles. Setup was manual: many tools, double-digit browser tabs for one step, and hours of producer time from Zendesk request to finished Zoom event. Early on, short staffing meant declining some Circles.

What I built

I mapped the whole process into one giant flowchart, then built dozens of Zapier workflows and Airtable automations from it. The core is one long multi-step Zapier workflow; smaller automations around it update Airtable (or Google Sheets) and notify people in Slack.

One large workflow was the most seamless way to pull from Airtable, create the Zoom event, write data back, create the Google Calendar events and generate custom Zendesk and email responses in one pass. In all, I built 150+ automations across projects at Modern Health.

Circles scheduling, end to end

A Zendesk request becomes an Airtable record, the source of truth. Zapier calls the Zoom API to create the event, writes the links back, builds the Calendar events and facilitator decks, and drafts the email. The producer sends it, so it still reads personal, and Slack notifies the team.

What broke, and what I changed

Most breakage came from messy form entries: one trailing space could break the Zoom API request. A checker automation now trims spaces and flags anything else, like several emails in one field, in Airtable before the main workflow runs.

When Zoom began censoring URLs in its API responses, a find-and-replace step put our own IDs back.

The workshop catalogue deck

Airtable holds about a dozen details per workshop. An Airtable automation, Zapier connectors and a Google Apps Script turn them into a Google Slides catalogue deck. One click refreshes it, so sales has one always-current link. The refresh is a manual “Run script” step, so nothing changes by accident.

A related workflow copies a master deck, fills in the date, speaker and company, and files it. Free text in a URL field once broke it, so that field is now URL-only.

Results

  1. Setup went from hours of manual work to one step that runs in seconds.

  2. Errors became rare. Each failure turned into a check or a fix.

  3. In my first year we declined some Circles for lack of people. By my last year the team was smaller and the business had grown substantially. I think this workflow helped make that possible.

How I define success

  • It works.
  • It saves clicks and time.
  • It’s documented, so someone else can fix it.

What I’d do differently

  1. Swap the find-and-replace step for a small custom script or proper security tokens.

  2. Add an approval screen for the deck refresh, in Airtable or Slack, that summarises what will change.

  3. Show more with screenshots. I used diagrams because the real records are internal.

Keep reading

Next: contract automation →All projectsAsk me about it