With today’s technology constantly evolving and improving, it seems like staying in touch with constituents is getting easier every day.  What are some useful tactics that public officials are using to stay in touch?  Here are a few methods both traditional  and modern.

Personal Phone Calls

Some say that the old way is the best, and this is certainly true for Illinois Rep. Timothy Johnson who makes it a point to call at least 100 constituents every day.  These phone calls are made when he is walking to a meeting or running on a treadmill, and it has had a tremendous effect on his constituents.  Most constituents contacted were surprised to learn that the phone call was not a recording, and this has paid off in dividends.  Representative Johnson has won every single election since 1971.

Text Messaging- Get Instant Results

Positive results have also been shown by incorporating the use of text messages to contact constituents.  This was a key aspect of President Obama’s national campaign in 2008, which used this tactic to successfully target young and new voters.  The best benefits of using text messages is that people always have their cell phones on them- if you send them a text, they are most likely going to receive and read it within minutes.

Adding Personal Videos to Your Blog

With more and more elected officials turning to YouTube, video blogging seems to be the way of the future.  Why not take constituent concerns and post a video blog in response to them?  Everyone on the Hill understands how valuable face time is to constituents and this provides an easy medium when actual face-to-face time isn’t possible.  Lance Armstrong started a video blog that has done wonders to promote the Livestrong Foundation.  His blog features updates on his campaign and also offers some personal insight into his life.

We need to evolve to meet the needs of an ever- changing world.  This requires mixing it up every now and then to see what works for you and your constituent base.  With Representatives having an average of 650,000 constituents in their districts, we at Fireside21 are making it our priority to make constituent contact the easy part of life on the Hill!

As more and more of our clients continue to use the Fireside Email platform for sending emails to constituents, we’re refining the ways that these emails are formatted. Our goal has always been for emails to show up with consistent formatting regardless of what provider is used to open them. While all of the popular email providers render emails a little differently, we have noticed that Outlook 2007 has some unique issues.

We wanted to call attention to a common photo resizing issue in this post. Though it’s very easy to paste photos into your emails and resize with the Image Properties tool, you may find that the photos appear as if they haven’t been resized when viewing a test email sent to an Outlook account. Don’t worry–you did everything right!  The issue lies in the way Outlook reads HTML code. In the code of your eNewsletter there are two sets of tags that hold the size information for your resized photo. Outlook reads the HTML code for emails a little bit differently than other email providers and may be reading the original size tag rather than the newly resized tag.

We’re working on a way for both tags to automatically update when you manually resize a photo in the text editor, but until we launch that fix there is an easy solution! There is one additional resizing step to ensure your images appear the correct size in Outlook 2007. This step updates the code so that both sets of size tags are correct.

• Once you’ve pasted your image into the text editor, you can manually resize by clicking on the photo and dragging any corner to stretch or shrink to your desired size. Be aware that the height to width ratio will change if you don’t drag carefully.
• After choosing a new size, right click on the photo and select Properties. You will see that the height and width values automatically update with the height and width values of the resized image.

You can read more about email formatting in our support pages.

I hope everyone had a nice August recess! We’ve been busy wrapping up a number of client projects as well as recruiting new people to our team at Fireside21. We were sad to say goodbye to Andy at the end of the summer (who is now at Duke Law School) and the timing happened to coincide with us adding two new positions in the company.

With that, I’d like to introduce you to our two new Account Coordinators, Stefanie Itzkowitz and JeNaye Johnson, as well as our newest Software Developer, Scott Sadlo.

Stefanie Itzkowitz – Account Coordinator
Stefanie has a unique background, having previously worked as a civics teacher and educational manager in South Florida. During that time she used her knowledge and passion for technology to develop and facilitate professional development workshops for educators who wanted to bring their classrooms into the 21st century…read more

JeNaye Johnson – Account Coordinator
JeNaye recently graduated from Duke University with a B.A. in Psychology. While at Duke, JeNaye was an active member of the university marching band and served on the executive boards of a number of student organizations aimed toward connecting students with campus resources…read more

Scott Sadlo – Software Developer
With over a decade of experience specializing in full-cycle web application development, Scott’s technical knowledge runs from web browser plugins to backend storage systems…read more

Please join me in welcoming all of these great people to our team!

Congratulations to Katie, Sean and the entire team in Congressman Fred Upton’s office on the launch of their new website. Constituents in Michigan’s 6th District will be well served with this new, easy to navigate site: