Fireside21

First of all, I wanted to thank all of our clients for another great year on Capitol Hill.  We continue to be the leading provider of Web and email solutions for Congressional offices.  Despite losing a number of long-time clients who retired or did not acheive re-election, we will end the year with more clients than we started.

IN THE NEWS

Perhaps the biggest news of the year was our departure from the Adfero Group.  I know we will continue to have strong ties to all of our former colleagues at Adfero, but we’re excited about the focused mission of Fireside21.

Along with the launch of Fireside21, we re-branded all of our Web-based software tools:

• Fireside Web™ continues to be the gold standard for Congressional Web site design and content management.  Recent surges in traffic only served as a reminder of the benefits of Fireside Web™. Also, as we have promised, we’ve continued to add new features and functionality to this industry-leading platform.

• Fireside Email™ has also received attention from our development team to establish this email newsletter system as second to none.  We’re excited to be helping our clients communicate more effectively with our integrated approach.

• Fireside CRM™ gained preliminary approval from the CAO and will be entering into the Beta phase early in 2009.  Advances in software technologies have been slow to reach the Hill and we are excited about this new service and the potential it offers to all of Capitol Hill.

We were also proud to show off our creative skills in helping the office of Rep. Mike Roger’s announce and promote his Energy Independence Plan.

A welcome announcement came from the House Committee on Adminstration to finally relax the rules related to third party/Web 2.0 services.  Many offices had been ingoring the rules anyways and we expect services like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to gain wider adoption as tools to communicate with constituents.

THE FUTURE

There’s no time to rest in 2009.  As when the new Congress kicks-off, we anticipate launching many Web sites for new members of the House.

We also anticipate launching user interface enhancement that will guarantee that all our software services continue to offer the best balance between ease of use and advanced functionality among Congressional vendors.

I love working at a small business and constantly consume publications like Fast Company, Inc, Business Week, etc. Most people outside the beltway don’t know it, but Congressional offices are small businesses too. Each office has it’s own finances, technology infrastructure and HR roles to go along with drafting legislative policy and serving their constituents.

Increasingly, small businesses and Capitol Hill offices are turning to hosted, software as a service tools to improve productivity. All of Fireside21’s services (Fireside CRM™, Fireside Email™, Fireside Web™) are hosted solutions.

As Jeremy Quittner explains in How SaaS Helps Cut Small Business Costs,

Hosted software, or software-as-a-service (SaaS), has been around for about a decade. It’s software delivered via the Web rather than residing on a company’s own servers. Companies pay a monthly fee instead of buying the software outright, and don’t have to worry about software licenses, server maintenance, or IT staff to manage complex programs.

One common concern is data security, but as he says,

That might sound like a security hazard, but your SaaS provider probably has better security than you do.

Alluding to Malcolm Gladwell’s concept in The Technology Tipping Point, Gene Marks writes,

Do you really need to drop a few grand on another server this year? Can’t it wait until next year? Isn’t there some “cloud” to put it on or something?

The benefits of SaaS are clear,

The guys I know who go for SaaS do so because it makes their people more productive. They can get data to and from their people faster, no matter where they are. They don’t have an internal IT infrastructure and find it less expensive to rent the software rather than set it up themselves.

In particular, Customer/Constituent Relationship Management software is particularly well suited to the SaaS model.  So how do you know if CRM software is right for your office?  Well, pretend that Marks is speaking of constituents rather than customers when measuring the ROI of CRM,

By making sure that all quotes are being pursued to their very end. By making sure customers who haven’t heard from you in the past six months are hearing from you. By making sure prospects who may in the future think about buying something you sell are hearing from you frequently enough to make them come to you first. By making sure you don’t look like a dope when customers call because you don’t know who communicated with them last and what problems they may be having. Think of all of all these situations you’ve encountered in the past three years, calculate how much revenue you’ve lost, and then compare that against the cost of a CRM system—and voilà!

On Capitol Hill, Fireside21 is the only vendor to offer a hosted CRM solution that unites traditional correspondence tools with our web and email platforms.  This is the future of Congressional communications and is exactly what Fireside21 is all about.

We got a great plug from the Politico today about Fireside21 and our services:

The name is a modern twist on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside radio programs of the 1940s, Fireside 21 CEO Ken Ward told Suite Talk.

“Barack Obama has used the term ‘fireside chats’ a lot recently, which is good for us,” Ward said. “What we’re doing is linking lawmakers to their constituents using the most cutting-edge technology.”

In particular, Fireside 21 — which designs congressional websites, among other things — uses its unique Constituent Relationship Management System to digitally organize the sometimes overwhelming amount of correspondence handled by congressional offices.

From Politico’s Suite Talk.