Networking is about connecting with others. Maybe you’re looking for a new job, career, or mentor. Perhaps you moved to a new place and would like to jumpstart a social life. Or maybe you’re an artist on a mission to get your work shown, an audience to show up, press to cover it, and critics to pay attention.
Keeping track of all of those encounters, corresponding contact information, and which face goes with which name can be challenging. Airtable can help, with easily customizable bases that enable you to keep track of connections in the ways that work for your particular goals. Choose from the templates below to organize and optimize your networking efforts.
Create a comprehensive cache of contacts
You remember meeting so-and-so, but how did you capture their contact info?
Between the business cards and Post-its at the bottom of your bag, and the random numbers plugged into your phone, you seem to know a lot of people. The problem is, you can’t find any particular one easily.
Create a central source of contact information for anyone you meet with this Personal CRM template. Because you can edit this base from your smartphone, you can pop the data in while you’re talking.
Your contact lists can then be sorted and filtered in various ways to help you surface the right people at any given moment. Hopping on a plane to Chicago for a business trip? Sort by location. Need an electrician PDQ? There’s a built-in category for “service professionals.” Decide it’s finally time to make a job move? Check the list of contacts in the “places I’d like to work” view.
⚡ Pro tip:
If it’s important to you to check in with particular contacts on a consistent basis, use the Catch Up Calendar embedded in the template.
Download a free Personal CRM Template
Network to grow your small business
The life of an entrepreneur is a hectic one, with lots of details to keep track of–and many of those “details” are people. Startups and small businesses alike need a way to inventory all the people who’ve expressed an iota of interest in your business or product. This list will be the foundation of all your marketing experts, and it will grow, and grow and, hopefully, grow some more as time goes on.
Starting with this Small Business Marketing template gives you the ease of use and scalability to input each person you meet, share the deets with others on your team, and easily export data for use in marketing campaigns.
> Want to get your small business off the ground? Check out our small business template roundup
⚡ Pro tip:
All marketing contacts are created equal, but some are more equal than others. Within this template lies a special VIP list you can use to tag the people you really care about.
Download a free Small Business Marketing Template
Organize your fellow graduates
This Alumni Directory template, while originally designed for alumni relations offices, works just as well for anyone who needs an easy contact list for their own fellow grads. It’s also shareable, so you can fill it in and share it with everyone in a class or cohort.
Given access, alumni can update their information any time a major fact about their lives changes—like their last name, phone number, or email address.
⚡ Pro tip:
Have a spreadsheet with this information in it already? Export it as a CSV and bring it into the Airtable base so you can do more things with your contact list. Here’s how.
Download a free Alumni Directory Template
Make progress on your post-grad job search
School is your first priority, but you need a job to support yourself while you’re there.
Of course, you have to keep track of all the options until you get the job offer, and you might want to return to your research later for a second or new job. With this Student Job Search template, you can view potential jobs and your networking efforts in different ways: alphabetically, by your interest level, and by what step you’re at in the process of exploring each.
⚡ Pro tip:
Because Airtable is a relational database, fields are linked to records. As you plug in information about a company, open up the record to add details such as the HQ address, the company’s website, the number of available jobs, and connections you’ve made at the company.
Download a free Student Job Search Template
Send holiday cards to your network
Maybe you have another system for keeping track of all the contacts you encounter in your networking, but you need a good one for organizing the colossal holiday card project you’re determined to undertake this year. For this, there’s a specific Holiday Card Mailing List template.
This template automates some of the logistical tasks that can make getting those holiday cards out seem insurmountable:
- Automatically generate printable cards and envelopes with the designer block
- Plot the location of each address with the map block
- Use tags to segment which cards to send my mail and which to hand-deliver
⚡ Pro tip:
As with any Airtable base, drilling down to an individual record gives you the ability to add extra information that might not be visible in every view. You can add notes or tag how you know the person, for instance.
Download a Holiday Card Mailing List template
If you’re interested in creating your own database, try more of our pre-made templates, or sign up for Airtable below to make one all your own.