I have a handful of causes for which I send a few emails a month. The turnaround time for anything involving a government agency though is typically glacial, and I will absolutely forget who I mailed about what when and why.
JIRA or SugarCRM would obviously be both overkill and a PITA to maintain… but I feel like there’s probably something more advanced than just a Google Doc that could help me send follow-up emails, maybe store relevant news site URLs, that kind of thing.
…AHunter3 reccomends FileMaker, and I love FileMaker to death, but it certainly isn’t the cheapest, and its recent constant changes to its ownership model have just made it confusing and frustrating to work with now.
Airtable is a great database/spreadsheet online solution that is better than your standard google doc that will allow you to do the things that you mentioned, but isn’t really overkill IMHO. It has free and paid options.
Another thing to consider (especially in regards to note-taking) is Notion. It calls itself a “database” but it falls short in several areas IMHO in terms of data integrity. But it works great if you are wanting to build a “Wiki” of notes and news site URLs. I use it to maintain a “knowledge base” of things relevant to my business. It also has free and paid options.
As always though, with online services, they exist at the whim of the venture capitalists (or the people seeking venture capital so they can eventually sell it) that run it, and sometimes those services can simply disappear overnight. So backup your data accordingly and have a backup plan, etc. But Airtable seems pretty solid and have been around a while.
…just one more thing: Notion isn’t great for data security, and I wouldn’t use it to store emails, any personal or proprietary information, or anything that you didn’t want to potentially be read by anyone else. It’s great for what I use it for (as a knowledge base) that I share with other members of my team, but be wary of other use cases.
Airtable is much more robust: but do your research first
Thanks for all the suggestions
If this was going to be more than a minor hobby I think I’d go for one, but as there doesn’t seem to be anything exact out-of-the-box, I’m going to roll this in to my other project of a personal wiki. That won’t itself be perfect, but with the scattered way I normally work, having all my information in one place will be an advantage I think.
