Networking/Contact Wrangling

I am looking for an app that can help me keep track of contacts that I meet at networking events. Most people don’t carry business cards any more. I need a clean way to keep track of their contact info and a brief note about follow up or project interest, etc. Any ideas? I don’t want to add these people to my Contacts in my phone, but I do want to keep track and make sure I follow up and save their contact info.

I may or may not be looking for a very basic CRM. I don’t need to add lots of contacts, but several each week. I would like the ability to flag some to follow up with down the road. I would very much prefer to purchase this software outright and not do a subscription service. I look forward to your advice! Also, I don’t need to share this data, but I would prefer that it sync with my other Apple devices if possible. If not, I can get by with an iOS app on my iPad.

You could use Reminders. Either directly by opening Reminders and adding your follow-up todo to a “Networking Contracts” reminders list, or even by creating a simple Siri Shortcut to prompt you for contact info and follow-up due. The shortcut could then create the reminder for you. If you search in the Siri Shortcuts’ Gallery you’ll find a pre-packaged shortcut named “Set ‘Thank You’ Reminder” that is easily adaptable for exactly what you’re looking for.

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You’re right. Reminders, or Due, or Things will handle the reminder part just fine. But what I’m really looking for is a way to keep all these contacts straight and separate from my main contact list.

Notes? I only recently discovered that in Notes you can create folders to categorise notes, it’s become a lot more useful to me since I discovered that! :slight_smile:

Do you use groups in your contacts at all? That might allow you an option to let someone share their contact card with you which would automatically save itself to your contacts list but then you could hide it by adding to a group that’s not displayed. I do that on my phone for businesses (i.e.: plumbers, builders, insurance company etc.). Contacts that I may want access to but don’t really want to see all the time.

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I greated a group in Apple Contacts called Farley File and all new folks get added there before being moved to other groups as necessary. I’m currently playing around with adding some text in the notes field of new contacts and then creating a smart group to find them all for the call back and follow-up tasks.

This could also be a job suited for AirTable. It’s massively flexible, I’ve used it for 4 very different tasks. a quick search should turn up some results on using Airtable for customer realtionship management, which would likey translate reasonably well to your needs.

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