Sara Loretta - Blog Thumnail
09. January 2023

How to make beautiful charts for Notion with GRID

Sara Loretta is a digital operations specialist & Certified Notion Consultant who’s made it her mission over the last ten years to help teams work better together by building strategic processes and automations into their workflows.

Sara founded her agency, SYSTMS™ to support small businesses around the globe to increase productivity and reduce human error using tools like Notion and Zapier.

SYSTMS™ currently consists of a talented team of contractors that offer support in marketing, copywriting, and more. “When I’m not building for others, I’m running my membership program, SYSTMS™ Club, which focuses on providing freelancers the framework to improve their client processes” she explains.

Following the founding of her agency, Sara launched her personal brand in 2022, employing a tech stack that includes Notion, Arc (The Browser Company), Calendly, Paperform, GRID, Canva, Stripe, & Flodesk.

A creative solution for charts in Notion 

Sara learned about GRID’s Notion database integration from her Marketing Director during a presentation on social channel data. A smart surface for visualizing numbers and calculations, GRID is built on top of the internet's most powerful spreadsheet engine. It’s also the most accessible tool for turning data models from spreadsheets and other sources like Notion into beautifully visualized charts and interactive tools.

Before GRID, we didn’t have a great way to present data beautifully,” she explains. “As there’s no built-in Notion feature to build charts, adding another tool to the tech stack without proof that it would work seemed daunting.

Having tried a few different no-code tools built by Notion enthusiasts, Sara and her team continued to run into problems when these creators would stop building their product due to various constraints.

For Sara, GRID was an attractive option that combined ease of use with the ability to clean up or add data within the product without having to first go back into Notion. GRID’s database integration for Notion makes it easy for Notion lovers to build dynamic, syncable GRID charts with their data. Watch Sara’s video to learn how to do it yourself!

Use case: sharing social data

GRID has become a key tool for Sara when it comes to sharing social media data in a beautiful, accessible way.

We’re launching a newsletter sponsor network and beginning to work with sponsors personally for my Youtube channel, so a GRID document is a great way to house everything we need to share with partners.

“Anything that integrates well with Notion is OK in my book” Sara tells us. “Specifically, GRID’s Notion integration. It’s so easy – not only to setup – but to use on a regular basis. I love how easy it is to pull in new data and update databases inside GRID with new info.” Check out Sara’s Media Kit Template to see exactly what’s possible with the integration.

Although the businesses she works with don’t tend to rely on sharing data with clients in multiple ways, Sara and her team are finding it beneficial to work on and update the same set of templates for their GRID docs. “I feel like GRID is a leader in data visualization for the sole fact that you can build an actual document alongside data charts” she explains.

“Most tools are one or the other, and then you have to embed the work, which adds an unnecessary step.” For a huge variety of use cases like Sara’s, GRID and Notion work in tandem to provide versatile and powerful solutions.

GRID improves teamwork

What Sara most enjoys about GRID is its capacity as a team tool. “GRID enables everyone on the team to jump in and find a relevant use case, whereas other tools tend to be more role-specific.”

But what problem is GRID actually solving for users? Describing a key issue she feels is common amongst small businesses, Sara shares that companies often struggle (or simply don’t know how) to effectively collect and/or share the data they have.

“I have absolutely recommended that small businesses use GRID. With a tool like GRID, the overwhelm can be minimized and actually invite users to finally be excited about data.” 

Anticipating a growing number of use cases for GRID in the future, Sara and her team plan to continue using GRID for their marketing and sales tasks.

GRID streamlines and removes the unnecessary steps unlike its competitors, which saves time, extra costs, and resources.

You can catch up with the cool stuff Sara’s doing on YouTube and find SYSTMS™Club on Instagram and Twitter. If you’ve got questions about using GRID with Notion, just tweet at @thesaraloretta

GRID is a smart surface for visualizing numbers and calculations. Built on top of the internet's most powerful spreadsheet engine, GRID is the friendly data tool for next-gen teams who need to work better, together. Sign up for your free account!

Melanie Adams

Marketing

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