Newbie: can Agenda be used to manage meetings with external people?

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Hi all –

I’m looking for an app to improve and streamline my meetings, especially those done for networking and business development. I currently use Evernote for notes, Dex for contacts, and Fantastical for calendaring. Evernote has a nice way to create meeting minute notes from calendar events, but it doesn’t really have a way to track people usefully, so I’m looking for a better solution.

I organize my meeting notes based on who I’m meeting/have met with, i.e. the people and the organizations they work for. These people are not in my company, and often the meetings involve people from 3 or more organizations. I may initially only have a name and email address (from the meeting invite) but often they end up my contacts as well.

I love the design and feature set of Agenda, and would love to use it. Some of the screens shown in the overview video look like exactly the sort of features I want, allowing me to review materials by person as easily as by date. However after playing around for a few days I feel like I may be missing something. I frequently have to answer these sorts of questions:

  1. Who was in this particular meeting, and what companies/organizations did they represent?
  2. When did I meet with this person last, and what did we cover?
  3. Who else have I met with from their company?
  4. When is my follow-up meeting with them (if any)?
  5. What’s their email/contact info so I can quickly shoot them a message?

Is it possible to do this with Agenda for people outside your “team”? For example, is there a way to have Agenda auto-create a Person entry of some type for all meeting attendees, somehow tracking both the person, their organization and contact info? Using their email as the basis for the tag (e.g. @joe.smith@mycompany.com) seems like it would do the trick, but it looks like this syntax isn’t allowed.

I understand that Agenda from other forum posts doesn’t integrate with the Contacts app, so I’m also wondering if anyone has come up with creative workarounds for tracking contact-like info in Agenda to be able to answer the above sorts of use cases.

Thanks in advance for your help in answering these questions for a newbie!

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It is worth looking through the Talk section, where people often post their system. I have certainly seen systems come by for this type of work.

I think a common approach is to create a category for each company, and then a project for each group you meet with. That gives you a timeline for that group/person. You can go back and look at what you discussed last time before a new meeting. And a common trick is to setup a new note for the next meeting as well, and put things you need to discuss in there before the meeting arrives so you don’t forget.

Of course, you can link notes to calendar events, so if you have a planned meeting, you should link a note to the meeting. You can then navigate to and from your calendar.

You can also use tags for cross project relationships. Perhaps if a project involves multiple companies, you might put the same tag in various people’s time lines. But often it is best to use a single project for things that are closely related, even if it involves multiple people from different companies. You can setup tags for people if you like too. If you use brackets, I think emails should work… like this… @(drew@agenda.com)

Hope that helps! Take a look at other posts in the Talk section for inspiration.

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Thank you @drewmccormack. Your last point–setting up some sort of tagging/organization for people outside my company–is what I seem to be stuck on. I tried your example:

@(drew@agenda.com)

For me, the app treats the above as an email address, i.e., it creates a hyperlink, which then launches your mail client. Can you confirm that this actually works for you when you try it?

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I see what the problem is, link creation indeed takes precedence over tags, we’ll see if this can be improved.

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Thanks @mekentosj is there somewhere I can file this as an enhancement request?

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I’ve made note of it already, no need