We are a small content site that need a way to keep track of contacts which we use to interview for article research in our writing process. On most articles we try to find an expert and interview them about the specific topic. The goal here is to keep track of people we’ve interviewed so we can reuse them and also make sure we’re not stepping on each other’s toes and emailing the same people at the same time.

Right now we are tracking in various spreadsheets individually and we have to check with everyone if they have contacts or who is talking to who and when.

Key Features:

• Contact Table - captures key contact info, tagging based on expertise, display last time we talked
• Interactions Table - log all the interactions we have with the contacts in above table

Contacts Table:
We want to maintain a good list of experts we’ve worked with over the years so we can tap them again if there is a good match for a future article. We also need an easy way for our writers to add people and ensure that the data they enter is complete and doesn’t result in any duplicates.

It would also be nice to be able to track multiple people who all might work for the same organization (so if emails are joe@cnn.com, max@cnn.com, mary@cnn.com: we’d show on joe’s record that interactions with max and mary because we’ve related them because their emails all end in @cnn.com)

Interactions Table:
I currently have three writers that interview different experts in various topics. I also email people from time to time. I would like to have a way to manually enter a interaction (in person, phone call, video interview, featured in blog post).

The part I’m having a hard time with is automatically logging emails. I want a zapier integration so that if anyone emails them or receives an email, it adds a record to the interaction log, but ONLY if they already exist in our contacts table.

For people we email and receive emails from, which are not in our contacts table, the emails would never be recorded in the interactions table at all.

Other Points

• First and foremost I want to keep this simple and very lean
• Want an easy way for people to manually enter in new contacts
• Needs some logic to make sure we don’t enter duplicates and data entered is good
• Want a limited access for my writers to not be able to alter main elements of this setup
• Also would be looking at your recommendations for better usability and functionality