Josh of Youth Hacks wrote up a great summary on using Highrise in youth ministry and agreed to cover it here at Life In Student Ministry as a guest blogger. Thanks, Josh! Here’s his review on the free service:

Building and maintaining relationships should be the primary goal of any youth worker. Unfortunately, most of our to-do lists would say otherwise. Highrise can help.

Simply put, Highrise is “an online contact manager that helps you keep track of who you talk to, what was said, and what to do next.”

Here are a few of my favorite features:

• Notes: You can keep track of all of your interactions with people. This can be a useful way to remember your last conversation with a student. You can even forward emails directly into Highrise!
• Tasks: Create to-do’s that are associated with individuals. This is great for scheduling follow-ups with students.
• Sharing: Since Highrise is web-based, you can give your team access to all of your contacts at anytime.
• Importing/Exporting: Highrise makes it easy to get your data in and out whenever you please. It’s compatible with Outlook, Mac Address Book and others.

Please note: While Highrise does offer paid plans, everything I’ve described here can be done using the free plan. Sign up here!

For more tips on using this free online contact manager for youth ministry, check out the additional Highrise tips on Josh’s blog where he describes how the tagging system works great for keeping track of grades, graduations, schools, youth group visitors and more.

CONTRIBUTE TO FREEBIE FRIDAY: If you’ve benefited from others who have freely shared their youth ministry resources online, consider giving back to the community by sharing your own materials here. Send me your donations for review and if I publish them in a Freebie Friday, you’ll receive full credit, a link, lots of gratitude and a warm feeling inside that comes from sharing with others.

[ Sign-up for other freebies and content added to this site! ]

[tags]Highrise, 37signals, contact management, youth group[/tags]

Posted on June 1, 2007