Everything You Need To Know About... Evernote
Evernote’s slogan challenges anyone who has ever knotted a string around his finger to use its applications (apps) to “make modern life manageable.” The company’s software and mobile apps promise to make all electronic files—from handwritten agendas, to photos, to website “clippings”—easy to collect and, importantly for retirement plan advisers, to find again when needed. These “notes,” conveniently organized into “notebooks,” may include attachments, such as PDFs. Users may tag, review and update their content as needed, upload and export new files, and even receive comments from colleagues and friends.
Evernote’s basic offering, which includes free software downloads and mobile applications, is promoted on its website as “the best way to organize your life.” There is a 60-megabyte-per-month limit on new notes but unlimited total storage, and the program is compatible with all mobile and desktop devices. Users may search their notes by keyword, notebook or tag. Text that appears inside a photo is also searchable, which can help advisers find a particular business card, receipt or event program. One of the eight available products, Penultimate, allows advisers to handwrite notes that can be saved, synced across all devices, shared across various platforms and searched from their Evernote account.
For $5 a month, Evernote Premium offers 1 gigabyte per month in new notes, as well as superior support and features. At $10 a month, Evernote Business was designed to facilitate team collaboration, and links individual projects with related content from co-workers. Users are given access to the Premium benefits, 4 gigabytes of new notes each month, administration features and centralized billing, among other advanced capabilities. One feature, Presentation Mode, moves notes from an Evernote account into a display that may be projected and shared either within an adviser’s team or when meeting with clients and prospects.
Though Evernote has several other offerings, plan advisers might find these two the most useful:
Evernote Web Clipper. This browser extension—the program’s elephant icon will appear at the end of your URL bar after download—allows users to store all or part of what they find on a particular website. To create a note, “clip” the article, the “simplified article”—i.e., a cleaned-up version of the page that omits related links, advertisements and other filler—the full page or a screenshot. You may also clip a bookmark—a small pop-up including the page’s title, URL and a few lines from the opening paragraph. Web pages can be typed upon, highlighted and marked up, circled and stamped, and—in case you would like to blur part of an image—pixelated. Once the note is complete, it can be tagged and saved in a notebook on Evernote, or shared on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or via email.
Evernote Hello. This contact-managing app, which integrates with the basic Evernote application, can help advisers on the go. New contacts may be added manually, and Evernote will search for an email address across Facebook and LinkedIn to build a profile for that individual. If advisers take a picture of a business card, the app’s text-recognition capabilities will automatically store that information. (Premium users have access to unlimited card scanning.) Before a meeting, Hello can pull attendees’ names from the adviser’s calendar as well as gather information about them from the adviser’s Evernote account, their social media profiles and other sources. When gathering in person, the Hello Connect feature can link a group of people in a matter of seconds.
Evernote’s services include several unique products that can support retirement plan advisers as they research clients, investments and the market, and even some that may help when advisers meet new contacts or prospects.