How to Use Trello to Maintain Authentic Relationships

7 min readSep 8, 2018

This is how I use Trello to remember to keep up with friends, family and professional contacts to forge strong and authentic relationships.

If you haven’t signed up for Trello yet, please consider using my recommendation link. If you sign up, I get a month of Trello Gold for free.

I personally value authenticity in relationships. Sometimes, that can present a challenge when trying to keep up with business relationships that hover somewhere between friendship and acquaintance, so I constantly ask myself how I can connect with people in more sincere ways.

I wanted a system that did the following things:

Provide a single location to keep notes on interactions with contacts
Tells me each day who I should reach out to based on the last time I talked to them
Be able to automate some actions
Be able to access the information from my phone or any computer with an internet connection (rather than using a locally installed software)

After a lot of trial and error, I came up with a light weight CRM using Trello. This idea was inspired by Tyler from Riskology’s Trello board for keeping up with his friends. Tyler’s board is slightly simpler than the one I ended up with, but the basic idea is the same.

This is what my sample board looks like. Here’s a link so you can copy it to your own Trello account.

My Trello board for how to keep track of all of the people I want to stay in touch with on a regular basis.

How the Board Works

If you’re unfamiliar with Trello’s features, you can head on over to Trello’s documentation to read more about it.

For this board, here are the basics:

Cards — You can think of a card as a post-it note or an index card. A card has a “front” and a “back.” The front of the card is what you can see from the list view such as a cover photo, tags, and the title. If you click on a card, it reveals the “back,” which is all of the details you’ve added to the card such as additional attachments, comments, and checklists. In this board, a card represents a person.
Lists—These are columns that hold cards. They can represent a workflow where you move cards from left to right based on what stage of the process you’re in (To-Do, Doing, Done). They can also be used to hold cards with specific information. A card must be on a list in order to be visible on the board. For my board, I organize my lists based on the time a card is due.
Labels — Think of these as tags for your cards that allow you to filter them. You can make as many labels as you like and even color code them. These labels can be seen from the front of the card unless you assign the label gray as the color. I use labels for 2 types of information: details I want to be able to see from the front of the card and details I want to be able to filter by.

Lists

You can’t see all of the lists on the board, so here is a break down:

The board is set up with 7 lists that are automated using Butler for Trello:

Inbox — This is the list that I import new contacts into as I meet them down the line. I set up an automation using IFTTT to import any new phone contact as a Trello card.
Today — On the day a card is due, the automation on the board moves any card to the Today list. I use more automation to add the names from this list to my calendar and favorite to-do app so I remember to reach out to the folks on this list daily.
Next 7 Days — All cards that are due within 7 days sit in this list using automation to keep track of dates.
30 Day Look Ahead — All cards that are due between 8 and 31 days stay in this list (again with automation).
3 Month Look Ahead — All cards that are due between 32 and 90 days stay in this list.
6 Month Look Ahead — All cards that are due between 91 and 180 days sit in this list.
6 Months + — All the cards that are due in over 180 days live in this list.

Labels

As I said above, I use labels to track the details I want to be able to see from the front of the card and details I want to be able to filter through quickly.

An example of information I want to be able to see at a glance would be how frequently I decided to keep in touch with this person. So I created labels called monthly, every 3 months, every 6 months and once a year.

Additionally, I use labels to be able to filter through my cards quickly. For example, I add labels for different job titles. That way if someone ever asks if I know a video editor, I can easily find all of the editors I keep in touch with.

You can also make labels based on location. If you’re ever visiting Los Angeles, you can filter by who you know out there and you can try to set up times to visit.

The Calendar & Automating Due Dates

Every card in Trello can be assigned a due date. I use the due dates feature to let myself know when I will next try to chat with them. I decide what date to give them based on how frequently I want to stay in touch with them, so those brightly colored labels on the front of the cards come in handy.

I use Butler for Trello to automate the cards to move to the appropriate list based on their date. The way the automation works is on the day a card is due, the Butler Bot will move the card to the “Today” list.

I also use the Planyway calendar power-up in Trello to subscribe to the board’s due dates in my personal calendar. I then use a third party automation app called Zapier to create a task in my favorite to-do app whenever a card is moved to my “Today” list. That way I know every day who I should make an effort to check in with.

I talk about how I use Butler and Zapier in more detail in this post.

I use a calendar subscription URL to put my cards on my phone’s calendar.

Keeping track of interactions

Now that I know who I need to reach out to every day, I want to be able to note our interactions. To do this, I use the comments feature in Trello. After I’ve interacted with someone, I make a comment on their card.

The comments do have dates attached to them, but we’re all busy so sometimes you will fill in the details of your interaction a few days after they’ve actually occurred. The way I’ve ensured that I correctly remember when I last spoke with someone is by adding the date at the top of each comment in bold. You can bold words in Trello using Markdown syntax.

**text** will get you bold. It looks like this:

This is what a comment on the back of a card looks like using markdown syntax.

Another option for updating comments is using Trello’s email to card feature. I like to add a person’s Trello card email to their contact in my email program. I then bcc that email when I am corresponding with them.

A GIF walking through the process of copying the card email, adding it to my email contacts, then BCCing that email

Know what to say next

Sometimes an interaction will give you an idea of how you can break the ice next time you reach out. Instead of having to go scrolling through all of the comments on the card, you can add a checklist to the card that gives you ideas of what you can bring up.

Making sure you know when to reach out next

Once you’ve talked with someone, you can change the due date to the next time you want to reach out to them. The Butler Bot or Power Up will then move the card to the correct list on the board based on how far away the due date is.