Do Good Design

Another handy tool I’ve found that you might find useful: Highrise. With all the people I’ve been chatting with about social enterprise, I needed some way to keep track of them: who they are, who they work with, and what we talked about so I won’t forget next time we speak.

If you’re like me, you forget people’s names all the time, struggling to remember when you talked to them and what on earth you said. No more excuses because I’m going to introduce you to a free tool that’ll help you keep track of your contacts, easy-peasy: Enter Highrise, 37signals’ free contact management software.

I already use 37signals’ Basecamp software, which lets me manage my web design projects, collaborating with Beth, my developer, and clients to keep things well-organised.

So when I was Googling around for a free way to keep track of my contacts, I was happy to come across Highrise, because anything 37signals does is easy-to-use and practical.

Handy features of Highrise

Tasks: Make notes to yourself to “Call Anne about the paper”, or “Get back to David” and it will automatically email you a reminder at a set time and day.

Cases: Group related notes together, in one place. It’ll help you keep track of how you know someone if you can assign “Karen’s birthday party” or “RIBA conference”.

Upgrading

The free account lets you have 2 users, but you can’t upload any files. But if you want to pay $12/£6 a month or more, you can add more users and be able to keep files too. I don’t need that since I already keep all my project files on Basecamp, so the free version works great.

Verdict: the best free option

I tried creating my own contacts database in Excel and gave up when it crashed a few times trying to make a simple list. Searching around, most offerings want you (understandably) to pay for them, or they’re only for PCs. Highrise is on the web, so it doesn’t matter if you’re on a PC or a Mac, and there are just enough features to help without cluttering things.

Go forth and organise.