Meet the first 2026 Zappy Award monthly winners: May 2026
We launched the Zappy Awards in May to find the builders quietly redesigning how work gets done at their companies. We're on the hunt for the people who see a problem, pick up Zapier, and do something about it. We weren't expecting the bar to be this high this fast.
Key Takeaways
- Two builders won the first Zappy Award monthly prizes: Rachael Silvano built a points economy for 140,000 community members, and Jeff Hirsch governed Zapier across Redis in weeks.
So we've decided to move up our first monthly wins to start right now!
- When a member's point balance reaches one of six tier thresholds, the workflow fires: JavaScript transforms the data, three webhook calls handle authentication, pull the User ID, and apply the new rank inside the platform.
What the platform couldn't do natively, Rachael built in an afternoon using Zapier Copilot to work through the API calls she'd never written before.
- Every new use case was a one-off.
- A few weeks later, Redis had SSO, SCIM, governed access, critical app restrictions, and a path for teams to bring AI automation ideas forward.
- Jeff had never used Zapier the week he started.
Two builders won the first Zappy Award monthly prizes: Rachael Silvano built a points economy for 140,000 community members, and Jeff Hirsch governed Zapier across Redis in weeks. We launched the Zappy Awards in May to find the builders quietly redesigning how work gets done at their companies. We're on the hunt for the people who see a problem, pick up Zapier, and do something about it.
Rachael Silvano, Community Strategy Lead at Articulate Rachael manages E-Learning Heroes , a community with 140,000 active members. The platform they run on has no native points economy. There's no way to reward members for peer answers, guides, or contributions.
Vendors that could fill that gap wanted prices the community budget couldn't support. Without a development background. The system she built is a seven-step Zapier workflow that acts as a translation layer between Airtable and their community platform.
For more details please read the original article at Zapier AI Blog.
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