Evernote is a great place to store the business cards from the people you meet.  Most of us have some sort of container full of cards from clients, networking events, vendors, and contractors, etc..  I have seen drawers, boxes, old school Rolodexes, notebooks and even shopping bags full of cards. These collection formats make using and finding a card of the right person you need very difficult and time-consuming.  Storing your cards in Evernote is a much more efficient solution.

Stop Digging Through Piles and Start Searching in Evernote.

When you save cards to Evernote, the text on the image of the card becomes searchable text.  So even if you cannot remember the name of the person you met, you can search by just a single word on the card.  For example, if you were searching for a Fence Repair company, you could search on “fence” or “repair”.  Evernote would then pull up every card containing these words.  This turns a 10-15 minute search in that box of cards into a 2-second search on your computer, phone, or tablet!

How to Save Cards in Evernote

There are a couple of ways you can save cards in Evernote.  One way is to go to the Evernote app on your phone or tablet, open a note and take a photo of the card you want to keep.  You can also scan cards with Scannable or a desktop scanner.  The scanning and digitizing of the information on the card is a Premium feature of Evernote.  However, you can get a free year of card scanning by connecting your Evernote with LinkedIn on your phone.  You can learn more about the different features of Evernote here.

The following screenshots show how the process works:

First, take a photo of the card

The note in Evernote is created with the card when I take the photo.  Evernote will treat this as an image.  So, all of the text on the card becomes searchable data.  If you had handwritten a note on the card, the note you wrote is also searchable data (as long as Evernote can read your handwriting)

As a Premium Evernote customer, my card is digitized.  I have connected my LinkedIn to Evernote on my phone.  So, Evernote will go out to LinkedIn to search for the profile of the person’s email address on the card.  In this case, it is my own.  You can see the link to my LinkedIn profile at the bottom of the screenshot.  This makes it easy to connect to my new friend on LinkedIn.  Evernote has also pulled in the profile photo from LinkedIn.  This makes facial recognition of my new friend easier at our next meeting or event.

Once I click “Save” on the screen above, Evernote asks me if I would like to email this person my contact information.   You can add all of the cards you save to the contacts on your phone by setting up this option in your settings.  You can also choose to do this for individual contacts by clicking the  “•••” at the top of the note, and selecting “Save to Contacts”.  I personally like the ability to add people to my contacts on an individual basis, because not every person I meet will need to.be a contact.

After I click “Done”, the business card becomes a note where I can enter in key details about the contact. I find it helpful to make a quick note about when and where I met the person.  At this point, you can also add in tags to help you track or organize your contacts.  For example, tags like “prospect”, “active client”, “referral” or “vendor” might help you in your future searches.  For more information regarding organizing business cards to Evernote, read the Evernote Blog.

You can find more helpful ways to use Evernote by reading these articles on my blog.

Sara Genrich is an Organization and Productivity Consultant, an Evernote Certified Consultant and the creator of the Organizing@Work for Success Workshop.