Highrise

First of all, let me say that Highrise saved my metaphoric butt. And I mean that with all sincerity.

I’m not currently using Highrise for ministry purposes (it doesn’t exactly suit the nature of my job). I am, however, using it with a small business I run with a friend, and we’ve seen a tremendous difference in our company as a whole since we started using Highrise.

Highrise is the newest product from my heroes over at 37 Signals. They describe it as “an online contact manager that helps you keep track of who you talk to, what was said, and what to do next.”

They’re being modest.

If your work requires that you maintain relationships with a large network of individuals (read: youth workers) this application is a must for you. If you don’t currently have a youth ministry data base, this is doubly a must. Note: Highrise can be used to track more than just students…it could be a great solution for keeping tabs with parents, co-workers, fellow youth workers, organizations and companies, and whatever else you can think of.

Like all 37signals products, Highrise appears to be incredibly simple but, in fact, runs very, very deep.

Here are some of my favorite features:

Vcard export/import: If you already have lots of contacts in Outlook, Apple’s Address Book, Thunderbird, or any other compatible app, you can simply upload all of your contacts straight into Highrise. You can also easily download them to your machine. This jives with my rule of never inputting the same information twice. And since vcard is a standard format, once you have them on your PC you can do lots of cool things with them (like port them out to your phone or other mobile device, email them to other youth workers, export them to other machines, etc.)

Tagging: If you’ve ever used del.icio.us or flickr, you’ve no doubt experienced the power and flexibility of tagging. for the uninitiated, here’s the rundown: in traditional hierarchical folder file systems, you put a file in a folder, put that folder in another folder, put that in another folder, etc. The problem here is that you can’t put the same file in two folders (example: johnny can’t go in the “guys” folder and the “6th graders” folder.)

Tagging, on the other hand, simply associates a term with the file. So you can tag a student with tags like “visitor”, “member”, “male”, “female”, “6th grade”, “youth band”, “mission trip 06”, etc.

Once you have them tagged, you can call up any similarly-tagged items at a moments notice. I have a feeling that many youth workers could use this in place of a full-on database program (and probably should). You really have to play with this a bit to get a sense of how powerful of a tool this can be.

Tasks: This may be Highrise’s can’t-live-without-feature. You can associate tasks with any contact and set due-dates. If, for example, you have a meeting with a student and think “I really need to make sure that I call them in about a week to follow-up”, you can simply create a “follow up” task that’s due in one week. In a week you’ll get an email reminder to call them. For youth workers (a bunch notoriously known for lack of follow-through), this can be a real life saver.

Notes: Notes allow you to to keep track of all of your communication with a contact. This can be a lifesaver (I, for one, think it’s always good to keep track of all of your one-on-one interaction with students. It’s smart to err on the safe side.). You can simply write about your last interaction with a student in a dialogue box (which you can later reference on their contact page) or even cooler, you can forward emails directly to their profile. I find this feature to be immensely useful. And if you get an email from someone who isn’t in Highrise, they’re automatically added as a contact. Unbelievable.

There’s still a ton of useful features to be discussed (file uploading, importing from Basecamp, Cases, Companies, etc.) but I think you get the picture.

Lastly, a note on price: Like all 37signals products, Highrise has a few price-points. There is a free version as well as various paid plans. In my experience with 37 Signals (3 Basecamp accounts, 1 Backpack account, 1 Highrise account) I can say that their honest and fair, pleasant to deal with and their products are always worth what you pay.

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