Managing contacts

We're a big school, with over 100 teaching staff and 1750 students. We're a specialist school, with the outreach work that goes with that, and we're heavily involved in the delivery of the new Diploma qualifications. Around 30% of our students in KS4 now follow an alternative to the traditional GCSE options curriculum. All this means that for a number of years now we've been forging links with other schools, colleges, businesses and other organisations.

We're not very good at it.

There are huge issues about schools working in partnership (and enormous benefits, of course) but today's post isn't going to look at those; we'll save that for a future edition. I've been doing quite a lot of work lately on building up our industry links and what I've noticed so far is:

• there is a willingness on the part of companies to engage (especially small businesses) but they're not sure how;
• it's difficult to build a genuinely 2-way ("win-win") relationship since the school actually has little to offer that the firms are interested in, short of a warm, fuzzy glow and a bit of positive PR;
• I personally (and I suspect most teachers) find networking quite difficult - we're not used to it and don't understand the ground rules. (Should I have business cards or is that naff?);
• This is an area you either do "right" and invest significant time and resources in building long term relationships, or not at all;
  
• There's nothing that frustrates a company more that being contacted 4 times by 4 different people about the same thing. We have situations where something is promoted via our Work-Related Learning Coordinator, me, our Extended Schools Coordinator, through our newsletter to parents and any other staff who might know someone interested.
  

It's this last point I really want to focus on: surely there must be an IT solution to the problem of managing our contacts?

Use a shared Word file on the network

Dead simple. Easy for staff to use. Shared. Gets backed up. Searchable. Not exactly high profile...

Use a public folder in Outlook

We run Exchange 2003 so this is easy to set up (in fact we did it last week in 5 minutes to see how it would work). This is clearly better than Word in that contacts are stored in a proper database format where you can group them into folders, add category tags and search on any field you like. You can manage permissions easily so it doesn't get messed up and people can send email directly. My concerns at this stage are how easy most staff would find this (and whether they'd remember it) and the poor "Notes" feature. I'd really like to be able to maintain a record of the people who get in touch with each contact (including when, and about what) and a list of the events they've helped out with. It can be done, but it would soon become unwieldy.

Use a blog

I'm coming to the conclusion that we need to be publicising the contribution of our partners much more extensively on our website (maybe through a "Community Blog") - it would definitely drive traffic their way. I'm not saying we'd keep actual phone numbers on there (although we could) but it would seem a good way of keeping track of events that our contacts help us with. I could imagine the tags list on the side acting as a quick menu for finding a company.

Build a custom application

Not that hard, but we come back to all the maintenance and support issues I've gone on about in the past...

Use a web app

There are quite a few contact management solutions out there. Some are free, some not. Here's a quick list:

• Highrise is a paid for app by the well known 37 Signals brand. It looks really good, but is business-focused (unsurprisingly) and probably overkill.
• KeepM is free and simple. I like it a lot actually, especially the "History" feature, but the problem here is the fact it requires another username and password for everyone and who knows how long it will last (or remain free).
• Google Mail has a contacts feature. It's a bit like Outlook really (though the search is better) and I can only imagine using it if we didn't have Exchange. We'd probably create a new account and share it, but I guess there could be problems there with security.

For now, I'm road testing the public folder approach. I'm going to meet some of the main people who would be using whatever system we end up choosing next week to see what they think, so that should be interesting. If any readers have suggestions for other solutions I'd be keen to hear them!