These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Networking Reminder Tool


EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
As a business professional, building and maintaining a network of contacts is an essential but daunting task that is often done poorly. This task becomes particularly important when one is looking for a new job. While I was hunting for my summer internship, I saw the critical value that key network contacts can provide.  Because of the sheer number of people I was constantly being introduced to and reaching out to, the difficulty was in maintaining relationships with them as time went on. A lot of the relationships I built faltered and faded away because I lost track of individuals.  As a new Sherpa for the incoming class of 2018 MBA students, I wanted to build a tool that would help them keep track of their network and help them maintain the relationships that they build, leading to an easier job search.
The system I built allows users to fill out key information about their contacts, such as company, role, contact info, date last contacted, date to contact again, and any notes about the individual or past conversations, with a button enabled user-form.
I created a macro that when run daily by Windows Task Scheduler, will send the user reminder emails whenever the day’s date coincides with the ‘date to contact again’ field for each individual in the spreadsheet. If the ‘date to contact again’ field is empty, then it will automatically assign a date 30 days after the date of last contact.  The reminder emails contain all of the information about the particular individual contained in the spreadsheet, so that it is easy to quickly send off a personalized email or text right after reading the reminder.  If the user doesn’t update the ‘date last contacted’ field within 5 days, the system will send out a more urgent email and a text to the user to remind them to contact the particular individual.  



No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive