"What would we do without Highrise?" asks Tracy S Schmidt in this tweet. Schmidt is Lead Trainer at 435 Digital, a consulting firm that helps businesses with SEO, social media, web design & training seminars. She teaches classes for both public & private organizations and uses Highrise to keep track of class registrations.
We followed up via email to find out more about she uses Highrise. Here's what she wrote:
I run a new training program at Tribune focused on social media and SEO. Our attendees are readers of the paper, where we advertise our classes mainly, and Tribune advertising clients.
I need to keep track of the emails I get from all over, with questions about dates and prices and the like. We use clunky Outlook and it's hard to keep track of who asked for what. Plus I want to know who should get emails about particular upcoming classes.
So I've been using Highrise since the training program launched, which was March 1. We are now rolling it out nationally and partnering with a local university. What's more, a lot of attendees have the potential to become clients or subscribers to different Tribune brands.
Highrise has been great for helping me stay organized and now, as we grow our staff, my colleagues as well.
Here are some screenshots from Schmidt's Highrise account that show how she keeps track of communication with students:
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting way? Let us know.
Cyber-Duck is a digital agency based in London that specializes in user-experience, SaaS projects, and online marketing. Tom Hicks, Cyber-Duck's Online Marketing Manager, explains how the company uses Highrise below.
A CRM became a business requirement for Cyber-Duck in 2009 after Excel contact databases became messy and over-complicated. New members of the team found them difficult to decipher after years of new columns and redundant colour coding, and with the volume of enquiries we were receiving and proposals we were sending out it became difficult to keep track of new business.
During 2009 we were happily using Basecamp and knew that 37signals had another product which may suit our circumstances, but we wanted to consider all the options available to us. We set about trialling several other CRM systems for small businesses like ours, and found some great options out there, but they all had one thing in common – they were over-complicated.
What we needed was something that would give us the required functionality without all the unnecessary extras. There were 2 reasons behind this; firstly, training becomes much easier if a system is simple and indicative; secondly we wanted to ensure we were getting value for money. If a product has features which remain redundant, then you are paying for something you don’t need.
From our research, Highrise appeared to be the only solution to tick all of our boxes. It is intuitive and can be picked up with little or no training. We like the fact that we can manage and tag all contacts including staff, suppliers, associates' clients, and potential clients. The ability to browse by multiple tags (our tags shown at right) is especially impressive.
The latest ‘activity stream’ allows management to have a quick (and collaborative) overview of the current status of new deals without delving too far into the system. This is important to us because historically, internal communication about new business was difficult due to the large amount of information available and the lack of data centralisation. The ‘deals’ feature also allows a quick overview of projects which have recently been won or lost. This is great for building up a picture of cash flow for the coming months.
We’ve also found that the ‘follow up’ feature has been very useful for the sales team, as it gives them a gentle reminder of when will be a good time to follow up leads. Highrise simply works well for us; it has enough features to do what we need it to do, but 37signals don’t feel the need to continuously add more things we would be unlikely to use. It’s also quite cost efficient as pricing scales as the business does.
My tips for other Highrise customers:
Tip #1 – Exploit tags - Tags may be something you see all over the web, but don’t underestimate their power in the context of a CRM. Make sure you get all users to conform to the same tagging system, this means that when you need to find an expert in SEO or a list of your previous clients, you’ll be able to get them in the click of a button.
Tip #2 – Keep deals up to date – The whole point of a CRM is that it’s a centralised repository of information; so it’s important that you keep all your deals as up to date as you can. This means that when someone goes in to find out something about a deal, they will be presented with all they could ever ask for; thus saving time and streamlining both your day and theirs.
Tip #3 – Don’t forget the follow ups – Highrise gives you the chance to create simple follow up alerts (Tasks) for any employee. This is particularly great for sales as it allows you to set times to follow up your leads and be reminded exactly when you need to do this. Just like that, forgetting to follow up is no longer a problem!
John Gannon (below) is an Associate at L Capital Partners and he recently offered up "4 tactics that worked for me in my recent job search." One tip: Track your activities and follow up tasks in a systematic way. Gannon recommends using Highrise to get that done.
I’m a firm believer that the job hunt is very much like a sales process, where you’re prospecting (finding potential opportunities), conducting a needs assessment (interviewing), following up, and closing (negotiating your compensation package and signing on the dotted line). Any professional salesperson is using a CRM of some sort (even if it’s just a spreadsheet!) to track and plan their activities, and a professional job seeker should be doing the same.
For my most recent job search, I used Highrise from 37signals to track relevant contacts as well as specific tasks related to job opportunities. Their system helped me stay disciplined about following up and staying on top of specific job opportunities. (BTW, has anyone used the Highrise APIs to develop a job seeker focused app? I think this would be really cool and useful.)
Top Test Prep's Chief Educational Developer Jack Byers (shown below) explains how his team uses Basecamp and Highrise:
Top Test Prep is an elite private tutoring company with headquarters in Washington, DC — a sort of test prep and admissions counseling boutique. Our advantage in the market has always been the level of personalization we bring to our programs: our entire team gets to know the clients, we write customized study plans for every student, etc. Personalization is great in that it makes our job more rewarding and it definitely helps students learn better, but it takes a lot of extra work, and certain things are difficult to scale. This is where 37signals products have come in for our academic team.
How we use Basecamp
Before 37signals, we used email to interact with our clients and manage the tutoring. When you're a tiny company, this works — sort of. When we started scaling out, it was clear we needed a separate platform. We were sending homework, lesson plans, and college essays back and forth constantly, losing track of versions and sometimes losing files altogether. One really cool thing we do for students is have the tutor write a comment after every session. It lets them and their parents know how they're doing, forces the tutor to reflect actively on how the program is going, and keeps our academic team constantly up to date. As you can imagine, with over 100 active tutors, this would be an absolute nightmare by email.
So now we use Basecamp instead. We set up a new project for each student, and give access to the students, parents, tutors, and obviously our entire academic team. One great thing about Basecamp is that it's simple enough that we can send parents a two sentence message explaining how to use it. We post the customized lesson plan in the Files tab, where everybody can download it if they lose their hard copy. We also use this to edit admissions clients' college essays and to upload supplemental homework and cheat sheets for our students. We schedule each meeting as a milestone. And tutors log their hours in the Time tab. This is nice because it makes the process transparent — parents can see the exact same hours we use for payroll when they're being billed. Finally, we assign homework and keep track of various deadlines in the To-Dos.
How we use Highrise Highrise is a nice sales tool, but we actually use it for a lot more than that. When we talk to prospects, we like to get a really good sense of the student before we recommend one of our tutoring programs. We find out about their academic history, testing experience, learning styles, and other interests. Then, if they sign up, our academic team needs all that information that the sales team already got.
In the course of signing up and starting a program, a student usually speaks to at least three people, and they all need to know everything about the student in order to bring the level of personalization we pride ourselves on. Being able to pass a student seamlessly from department to department (sales tells them about our program, admissions helps them set realistic goals, academics makes a recommendation for tutoring) has boosted our conversion rate substantially — we estimate it at a 44% increase. It's also huge for us that Highrise integrates with other web apps, including our form collector and chat feature on our website.
Again, our goal is to be able to scale the personalization that's helped us grow in the first place. We don't want to be an "education factory" like our competitors, and there's no way to fake knowing your students. Highrise and Basecamp organize things for us so we have more time to spend with our students and tutors, which is the core of our business and always will be.
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting way? Let us know.
Trevor O'Sullivan, General Manager at DTS International, recently wrote us:
We have officially switched over to the 37signals Suite as of the last 3 weeks and we're loving it — thanks for building such an awesome product and taking the useless shit and clutter out of productivity solutions.
We followed up with Trevor to find out more about how his team is using the Suite. His response is below.
The search begins
We are a multifaceted company with several focuses all within the training and development market. Initially, we werte only looking for a CRM and I started looking at products around the place like Highrise and other online CRM tools - we were then using a product hosted on our own server. This search started in late 2009 during our Christmas holiday season in Australia but never went anywhere as I decided it was all too hard!
On initial review, I thought Highrise was too "entry level" and simply lacked features we needed like reporting and other common CRM features. This year we hired an absolute gun of a sales person and she has made a huge difference to our business. Since most of her time is spent telephone prospecting she came to me with her concerns/challenges with the CRM and how difficult it was making her job to fill in lots of fields or data we never used, the slow search capabilities (as we had around 20000 contacts) and the all around cumbersome nature of our existing CRM.
Hence I started looking again at CRM options and came back to Highrise. Still thinking it lacked key features without using third party applications and API function development from our end we decided to "try it out" it for a week. Once that week was over, our team was begging me to make the switch all the way. So we did!
Just after upgrading to a paid account 37signals came out with their new Suite offering and we had to have it — as we had started to play with the free version of Basecamp and Backpack and had fallen in love with them too!
Highrise
We have a database of around 10,000 customers and prospects (since making the switch we did a massive data clean and removed useless and duplicates from our CRM). For us, it is about tracking the interactions with customers and prospects, hence we use the notes and email dropbox heavily. We have started using the Tasks and Deals sections more and more to keep track of the deals we have in the pipeline and things we need to get done with different contacts.
Basecamp
We have just completed a business plan for our business (yes, I know plans are guesses!). But, for me, the business planning process is about the analysis and getting a feel for what we have to work with and then I can make better decisions in the moment. The plan/analysis produced around 8 pages of todos for us to work on to improve our business.
Every time I looked at the list is was so intimidated I stuck it back on the desk and looked for something else to keep me busy! One day I was watching the Basecamp videos and thought, "Let's set up a project." At that time, we only had the free version so had to use one project called "business plan todos" and divide up the list with our team, then create a rule in the business that at 4:30pm we stop what we are doing and spend 30 minutes to cross one thing of the list. It has been great we are so far in front of where I thought we would be. It is amazing and our team loves it because the can see how they are contributing to the business!
Below, author and investor Timothy Ferriss describes how he used Basecamp and Highrise to write his new book.
I am an angel investor based in San Francisco (Twitter, StumbleUpon, Evernote, Posterous, etc.), and am best known for my first book, “The 4-Hour Workweek,” which has been sold into 35 languages. For the last three years, I’ve been working on my new book, “The 4-Hour Body,” [Amazon link] which is a minimalist guide to hacking the human body. It covers everything: rapid fat-loss, better sex, better sleep, and I tested everything on myself with doctors and black-market scientists. The new book was a much, much bigger project than “The 4-Hour Workweek”, so I hired and trained an assistant (Charlie) to help me keep everything organized and actionable.
How we use Basecamp
At the end of 2009, I was sending Charlie chapters of the book to review. He’d track his changes in Word and email the files back to me. Within the first week, it became very clear that emailing back-and-forth was going to be a major time-suck and liability. Keeping things in order was hard, and we spent at least 20% of our time looking for the right versions of docs. In December of 2009, we started using Basecamp to keep track of all revised chapters. Right away, it made things 10 times easier, and I had Charlie start putting all of his other book-related work in Basecamp.
For instance, he would post useful “Tools and Tricks” that supplemented each chapter, and would have Basecamp send me a notification email whenever he posted something he wanted me to review. Every few days, I’d quickly look over all of the new posts from the Dashboard, and leave comments on a few of the messages. Basecamp became the war room for all things related to Project 4-Hour Body.
In 2010, I had a very sharp researcher and trained lab scientist (Alexandra Carmichael of CureTogether.com) help me with some of the technical science in the book. I wanted her to submit unusual findings and fact-check chapters, but I didn’t want to open up access to content in Basecamp that was irrelevant or that could be confusing. The solution was simple: we set up a new project, imported the few chapters she needed to work on, and gave her access to that one project. Having her work with us in Basecamp was simple, and we avoided confusion we'd experienced on every other platform.
Which features do you use most?
We limited our feature use to just ‘Projects’ and ‘Messages’ for a few reasons. First, we tried using ‘To-Dos’ for a few days, but found that we’d forgot about them almost immediately after posting. So we stuck to our usual ghetto ‘To-Do’ lists: writing on index cards or the back of our hands.
Some of the projects we currently have in our Basecamp are:
30-Second Science [This is the name we gave to the sidebars Alexandra was helping create.]
4HB Launch [All marketing plans and fun ideas related to the launch of the new book.]
4HB Photos [The book has more than 200 photos, and this is where we kept track of them.]
4HWW Marketing [One of the first projects we created, back in December 2009, when we released the expanded version of “The 4-Hour Workweek.” It contains all of our marketing ideas for that launch.]
Blog stuff [All of the high-level opportunities and promotions related to my blog, including: ways to monetize my existing content, short-list winners or finalists for the various contests I run, etc.]
Chapter revisions [The earliest drafts of each chapter, along with their revisions, are posted here as Word doc attachments.]
Miscellaneous [All of the random side projects and ideas we have related to the book. As is typical with anything labeled ‘Miscellaneous,’ is probably the most interesting section.]
Permissions – Graphics [Remember those 200+ photos we have in the book? Well, this is where we post all of the permissions we needed to get to use those pictures. Huge pain in the ass.]
Research & Resources [Each chapter in the new book has a “Tools and Tricks” section at the end, where I recommend cool practical stuff (resources, gadgets, etc.) for the reader that supplements the chapter text and makes it all actionable. This is where we posted everything we found, before I added the best ones into the manuscript.]
Picking Partners: Basecamp Becomes the Standard
Basecamp is now the standard when hiring or working with any team. Email might work with one freelancer, but what about when you have three designers and programmers in the mix? Familiarity with Basecamp became a prerequisite in those cases, and that's one of many reasons I ended up working with Digital Telepathy for the design of The 4-Hour Body book website.
They had previous experience with Basecamp, and within hours following our intro call, had posted all the milestones and deliverables for the program on a timeline (see "Overview" below). Here are some screenshots from our collaboration:
How we use Highrise
It’s no exaggeration when I say that we have a small army helping promote this book. We needed a place to keep track of all our conversations with everyone, and be able to quickly put each contact in appropriate groups. Highrise was the obvious solution. Charlie had used it before with a few of his previous clients, including New York Times bestselling authors Ramit Sethi and Tucker Max, so he already had a preferred tagging system he'd developed.
Here are some of the tags we use:
“.tim” – I use this to indicate people or companies I have strong connections with. They’re usually close friends of mine.
“@California”, “@NewYork”, etc. – Used to show where a person or company is located.
“company-in-book” – There are a ton of companies in “The 4-Hour Body.” We wanted to be sure we had them all listed out somewhere so we could easily reach out and open the door to help with the launch / give them free copies of the book.
“facebook”, “twitter”, and “youtube” – Some of our Highrise contacts have enormous followings online and have offered to help through their strongest channels.
“newsletter” – These are friends of mine with big email newsletters who had indicated interest in mailing to their lists.
“promotion” – Sometimes people and companies email me, saying they want to help promote the book. This tag helps us keep track of everyone who has committed to doing a promotion around the launch date.
How will we continue to use Basecamp and Highrise?
We have no plans to stop using Basecamp. It’s made our lives so much easier by completely removing the hassle of emailing documents back and forth. We’ll continue to use it to collect and organize our future ideas and projects.
Our contact list in Highrise is still growing, as we only just started using it about two months ago, but the more contacts and information we add, and the more specific our tags are, the more valuable it will become as an asset.
Dynamic Language is a Seattle-based localization, translation, and interpretation services provider that works in more than 150 languages and dialects. Below, Audrey Dubois-Boutet, Quality Control Lead at Dynamic Language, explains how the company uses Basecamp and Highrise.
We pride ourselves on our quality, accuracy and customer service. A lot of our current efficiency can be attributed to how we’ve integrated Basecamp into our processes. Basecamp has allowed us to both organize in-house operations and to effectively manage projects with our clients in a collaborative way.
Staying on the same page
Our Localization and Translation Departments use thorough processes to ensure all projects are delivered with the highest quality. To do that, we follow a series of Quality Assurance steps for each project, from verification and proofreading to graphic design to testing. We maintain a number of “To-Do List Templates” for our services, which allow our project managers to create projects very quickly, and because all projects are not created equal, they appreciate being able to customize their projects, as necessary. We’ve modified the structure of our projects to align with the Basecamp concepts of Milestones and To-Dos, so we can focus on high-quality and on-time delivery.
The ability to communicate via messages and comments in an organized, and “threaded”, manner is a great Basecamp component we could not do without. It not only keeps everyone accountable for their tasks and projects, but it also gives a helpful record of conversation history. New employees can jump in and get up to speed with ongoing projects or company practices simply by reading through past project communications.
Integration with existing systems
We have a custom internal database application that handles Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Payroll and more, and we’ve been able to use the Basecamp API to link our internal database bi-directionally with Basecamp. Whether a task is marked as complete on the Basecamp side, or internally, it’s immediately reflected on both systems. Our developer has been extremely impressed with how reliable and useful this interface has been, and we keep finding new ways to use the API.
WebGreek is a tool that aims to help Greek organizations manage their chapters online. The company recently added a new partner, fraternity Alpha Tau Omega, and CEO Patrick Allen credited 37signals in a Twitter post.
We followed up with Patrick to learn more. Below, he explains how Highrise helped close the deal.
I don’t need to tell you that remembering someone’s name is key to building a good relationship, but if you’re looking to get ahead, names simply aren’t enough. It’s the finer details – birthdays, family, anecdotes, and being able to order their favorite drink the next time you’re out for dinner – that matter. In other words, you need to be able to recall things you would know about a good friend, because in the end, the best sales people build a rolodex of friendships, not just clients.
Yet for most of us, doing this is much easier said than done. That’s where Highrise comes in. With Highrise, I’m able to build detailed personas for every one of our potential partners, Alpha Tau Omega included, and I always have that information at my fingertips.
Tradeshows and conventions serve as a perfect example for how helpful Highrise really is. After meeting dozens of potential partners in a single day, it’s virtually impossible to remember the nitty-gritty details of every conversation. Yet it’s precisely these little tidbits that matter.
In the case of Alpha Tau Omega, I was able to draw back on conversations I had with their CEO at the previous year’s convention. Can you think of a better way to say, “I’m listening to you and truly care about what you’re saying,” than that?
ARGH! You’re losing touch of who you contacted! When to follow up? Argh! Yellow post-it notes compete for space on your desk with lists of telephone numbers and business cards of people you’ve forgotten...Here’s how you use Highrise to show you who to contact when.
Agtel is an award-winning TV and video production company based in Dublin, Ireland. Below, Agtel's Alan Dargan explains why his team "loves using Basecamp and Highrise."
Agtel is recognised for the creativity and quality of its factual and documentary work for RTÉ and BBC, and we’re a market-leader in high quality videos that deliver results on-line for clients in the public and private sectors. As well as producing videos for clients like PricewaterhouseCoopers and the European Parliament, we also produce Ireland's longest running factual television series for state broadcaster RTÉ.
Basecamp is a great way for us to keep a track on projects from scripting straight through to post-production and delivery. It ensures that our clients have full visibility on every aspect of the process from asset management to deadlines.
Our clients love having a centralised hub for all project correspondence and can see where projects are at every moment. The main difference between corporate and TV work is that a corporate production (without a strict transmission date) can have ever-increasing amounts of amendments and changes. We recently had a job that spanned over two years and Basecamp was crucial in staying on top of all the changes over it's lifetime.
Highrise helps us keep a track of new business - we use Wufoo forms which integrate tightly with Highrise ensuring that all new business queries become a part of our project workflow from the off.
Our workflow usually starts with a query arriving from a Wufoo form on the Contact Us page on our website which immediately becomes a case or pending deal in Highrise. From here we can track initial correspondence with a potential client.
When a job is won we add a job to Basecamp, issue the client with a username and password and try to mediate all further correspondence through Basecamp. The starting point for any production is usually a script and a schedule and Basecamp allows us to keep track of important dates with Milestones and upload and track iterations of scripts. Confusion arising from versions mailed back and forth can cause headaches so knowing that everyone is working on the right one gives peace of mind. Tracking versions is also enormously helpful when it comes to posting up cuts of a production. We usually timecode these so clients can reference specific parts of an edit and we can then add the amendment to a To-Do list and action.
To-dos are hugely important and become even more so as a project comes to the end. It’s incredibly important that all changes received from a client are carried before a DVD duplication run is started or a production goes to air and it ensures that everyone can see what needs to be carried out to bring the production to completion. If there’s any ambiguity about a list item a query can be commented and sent as a message to the client.
The TimeTrack OSX Widget logs the time spent on particular parts of a project and send them straight to Basecamp which helps a lot with our timesheets.
Having access to archived projects is also hugely helpful allowing us to instantly retrieve old projects’ assets and messages.
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting way? Let us know.
I’m a firm believer that the job hunt is very much like a sales process, where you’re prospecting (finding potential opportunities), conducting a needs assessment (interviewing), following up, and closing (negotiating your compensation package and signing on the dotted line). Any professional salesperson is using a 
On initial review, I thought Highrise was too "entry level" and simply lacked features we needed like reporting and other common CRM features. This year we hired an absolute gun of a sales person and she has made a huge difference to our business. Since most of her time is spent telephone prospecting she came to me with her concerns/challenges with the CRM and how difficult it was making her job to fill in lots of fields or data we never used, the slow search capabilities (as we had around 20000 contacts) and the all around cumbersome nature of our existing CRM. 
I am an angel investor based in San Francisco (Twitter, StumbleUpon, Evernote, Posterous, etc.), and am best known for my first book, 
Agtel is recognised for the creativity and quality of its factual and documentary work for RTÉ and BBC, and we’re a market-leader in high quality videos that deliver results on-line for clients in the public and private sectors. As well as producing videos for clients like PricewaterhouseCoopers and the European Parliament, we also produce Ireland's longest running factual television series for state broadcaster RTÉ. 