Swapcard manages data collection and freelancers through Forest Admin

Working with freelancers can easily become complicated when sensitive data is at stake. One must be able to integrate them in the work process without giving them access to everything.

However, as the head of Growth at Swapcard explains, Forest Admin provides the tools to clearly define the scope of each mission and by this token smoothens collaboration and eases day-to-day operations.

Swapcard is a French start-up that launched 8 years ago and that started with digital cards – hence the name. Quickly though, the company decided to pivot towards the event planning industry, and more specifically the planning of professional events.

Swapcard under the hood

As a B2B solution running on NodeJS, Swapcard “helps planners to digitalize the content of their events for participants,”Robin Herzog, the head of growth explained.

Beyond mere planners, the company also helps those who expose their goods to improve their return on investment (ROI). “They can scan leads, access the list of participants, gain visibility and generate data,” which they can exploit later on to learn and improve.

Participants can network further and make the most out of the event. On the other hand, planners can learn from the data they generate during the events and offer a better experience overall.

Forest Admin, as we learned during our conversation, is central to the way Robin and his team perform their activity.

When Forest Admin meets Swapcard

Robin found out about Forest via eFounders where, naturally, they talked about us.

Sandro Munda – Forest Admin’s CEO – collaborated with eFounders to launch the product and build the team as part of eFounders 2016 batch of startups.

Back to Swapcard, Robin Herzog chose us because he wanted to develop a backend for their lead generation system without having to take care of the front-end.

Although Robin developed an interface himself four years ago but realized that it takes enormous time and effort to develop and maintain, whereas it could be handled by another service.

Team Operation

Swapcard targets two types of leads: corporates and planners specialized in a particular type of events.

The company’s algorithms collect various event data – names, dates, event types etc… – that they store in their PostgreSQL database. This data is not clean though, which is where Forest Admin intervenes and helps the company.

As Robin puts it, “they needed an interface to clean their data other than excel because the latter isn’t re-injectable easily in the database… and because there are specific object relations – one-to-many or many-to-many – in their schema.

“It is too complicated to handle in a CSV file,” he added.

“We define in Forest Admin the data we wish to scrape with our scrappers that launch every two weeks… we then verify the state of the data and also evaluate if the system is working fine,” he explains.

One of his team members at Swapcard will then create two different Teams – Admin and Operation – to strictly limit roles and what freelancers can see. Robin then ensures through activity that they are properly doing their job.

They categorize events by specific groups, then manually review and validate them through Forest Admin.

Once fully reviewed, Robin and his team have configured a smart action that will send this event directly to Salesforce – the job is done.

Key features

Robin is enthusiastic about Forest Admin in general, and maybe even more about Workspaces that he finds promising.

Workspaces enables Swapcard to give freelancers they hire the ability to perform CRUD operations directly on objects, through shortcuts, without having to fetch deeply-nested properties and without roaming free in the back office.

Since the data is already public and freelancers do not have access to Salesforce, “there is no security issue at any point during the entire process,” he clarified.

The Teams and Roles features are crucial to their daily operations, as are smart actions that they use constantly to handle data and transfer it between various systems. Robin counts around 10 smart actions configured for various purposes at different operational stages.

Swapcard uses a hyper-customized version of Forest Admin that enables them to have a truly tailored and therefore efficient day-to-day experience.

More about us

If this case study rings a bell and some of the issues described sound familiar, please reach out to us.

We will be happy to discuss with you and book a demo to show you what Forest Admin can do for you.