Do you need a personal CRM for friends and family?

If you have searched for a way to remember more about the people in your life, you have probably landed on the term “personal CRM”. It comes from sales software, and that origin explains both what these apps do well and why they can feel wrong for friends.

What a personal CRM is built for

CRM stands for customer relationship management. Personal CRMs took that idea and pointed it at an individual’s network. They tend to offer:

• Sync with email, calendars and LinkedIn, so contacts fill in on their own.
• Tags, stages and lists for sorting hundreds or thousands of contacts.
• Reminders to reach out on a schedule.
• A web app and an account, so it works across devices.

They usually cost somewhere around $100 a year or more.

When one is the right tool

A personal CRM fits when your contacts are part of your work: you are job hunting, raising money, selling, recruiting, or building a professional network on purpose. In those cases you do want every email logged and every contact tagged.

Why it can feel wrong for friends

Friends and family are a different job. You are not managing a pipeline. You want to remember that Nick’s father is in hospital and ask about it on Friday.

People who try a CRM for this tend to run into the same things:

• It feels like work. Stages and tags make a friendship look like a deal in progress.
• It wants an account and your contacts. Details about your friends end up on someone else’s servers.
• The price is set for professionals. It is a lot to pay to remember what your brother told you.
• The notes come second. Most are good at reminding you to reach out and weak at holding what the person actually said.

What to look for instead

If the people are friends and family, the list is short:

1. A place for each person where notes go in fast.
2. A reminder that is tied to what they told you, not just a schedule.
3. A way to read up on someone before you see them.
4. No account, and data that stays under your control.
5. A backup, so a lost phone does not take everything with it.
6. A price that makes sense for personal use.

Simple options

Notes and Reminders. One note per person and a reminder for the day you want to ask. It costs nothing and it works for a small circle. Keeping notes about people in the Notes app shows how to set it up.

A journal sorted by people. This is what Wajed is. Each person has a page. You write what they told you, and a memory about several people appears on each of their pages. A follow-up carries the question and the day to ask it, and on that day you get a notification. Before you reach out, or before an event, Wajed shows what to bring up.

Wajed has no account. The journal stays on your iPhone and backs up to your own iCloud, and the app can be locked with a PIN and Face ID. It is for iPhone only, with no web app and no sync with email or LinkedIn, so it is the wrong choice for a professional network. It is free for up to ten people.