by Rachel Smith
12 July 2017
I’m retiring my huge, falling-apart contacts file for something more digitally-friendly and wondered what everyone else uses? I don’t want to pay for a CRM because I don’t feel I need half the functions but would appreciate any ideas on how to keep track of interviewees – be it experts or case studies! MI hear you – because I am the WORST offender for not keeping track of experts and case studies. I think on average I might talk to anywhere between 8-15 different interviewees a month and for the most part, once I file the story, those people are just basically in my memory bank. Terrible housekeeping and a massive time-waster when you consider I write on the same topics a lot and could be easily using those people again. I do often use them again, but I rely on my memory of stories to track them down in my email. Ridiculously unproductive and something I am actively working on changing!
To try and fix the problem, I did start keeping an experts file on Outlook, but found it too hard to search. And like you, I had a big book where I diligently wrote down all my experts when I first started working in the industry. It was quickly out of date, with people crossed out and smaller contacts scribbled over the top and overall, it became cumbersome to find people in it. And I’m with you – if you don’t need a CRM, you don’t want to be paying the rather hefty monthly fees for it.
The good news is, we have recently introduced a solution in our Toolkit that’s become mighty popular: the expert tracker. It’s a simple contacts Excel file that’s searchable based on category. So if you are often interviewing people about, say, tractors, you could have a ‘tractors’ category, search on that in the file and it will spit out all the people you have ever talked to about trackers. Provided, of course, you have entered them in.
The only downside is filing through old stories to find all the contacts and updating them if necessary, and entering them in – something a good VA with remote access / access to your computer could easily do. At the same time, they could collate all your work into sections so you can easily find stories you’ve worked on before. Another time-saver!
You can find the expert tracker and all our other resources and tools here.
What do you use to keep track of interviewees?
