A CRM for personal life
I'm working on scratching an itch of my own: developing and refining my personal (ie outside of work) network of contacts in a systematic way.
For business, CRM usually boils down to:
-Keep track of sales
-Do customer support
-Keep track of social media, email campaigns, communication with customers, stuff like that
For private life you could boil it down to:
-Meet new people
-Do more with people you already know (ie have more fun together)
-Introduce people to each other in order to create a stronger network
Here are some examples of private life social "campaigns":
-Spend more time with grandparents
-Meet Chinese people to learn the language from
-Meet a partner
-Salsa dancing w/ friends
-Find a training buddy
-Go on fishing trip with casual acquaintance
-Meet new friends in new city you're moving to
-Host Thanksgiving
-Introduce one friend to another
Etc.
The question is: would you use a CRM to track your social life like this? Too creepy/machiavellian?
What features would be important?
My list of features that I would want:
-Import from Gmail, Linkedin, FB, etc
-Keep track of when I last emailed them
-Keep track of commitments/promises by myself/others
-Keep track of what kind of new people I want to meet
-Comments, journal, attachments, etc
-Set reminders to ping people
-Tag, and rate contacts on various dimensions (ie geographical proximity, how many years I've known them, what their skills/hobbies/passions are, do they know Spanish?, etc)
-Scan business cards (quite standard CRM feature I think)
-Connect friends with friends. I think this kind of combinatorics thing is really interesting. A personal life CRM could really help you spot opportunities for introducing friends to each other and see combinations that you might not have thought about before.
-Send out emails to friends and do analytics and A/B tests.
-Email templates for contacting multiple friends fast