In software and small business circles, Jason Fried and 37signals are well known, but here in DC, it’s likely that you’ve never heard of him. That’s a shame, because his company has a refreshing philosophy on work that should be embraced by fast moving legislators of the Hill.

He recently blogged about a class he’d like to teach:

It would be a writing course. Every assignment would be delivered in five versions: A three page version, a one page version, a three paragraph version, a one paragraph version, and a one sentence version.

This aligns closely with a topic I’ve been discussing with many clients lately: how to best respond to constituent inquiries across different mediums. Many of our clients are now experimenting with email versions of form responses that are significantly different from their long-form letter bretheren. Based on typical email habits, these responses are much shorter and to the point than a typical legislative letter.

Of course, with greater adoption of social media, the question is now how to revise these responses to as few as 140 characters!

How does your office handle these challenges? What systems have you put in place for official responses on Facebook and Twitter? What do you think about having multiple versions of your form responses: three page, one page, three paragraph, one paragraph and one sentence?

Here at Fireside21 we really appreciate client feedback because we need it to improve our offerings and to make our platform more user-friendly. One recommendation that we recently received was to allow the use of anchors within Fireside Email. If you haven’t used anchors, they work like a bookmark on a page so that a hyperlink lets you “jump” to specific location on a web page or email.  Anchors are very useful for creating a “table of contents” for long pages and emails.

While anchor functionality has always been available for web pages through Fireside Web, anchors were not supported in our email platform.  We’re happy to announce that the use of anchors in emails is now possible with one simple change to the settings in the Fireside platform.  Follow the steps below to gain full anchor functionality in Fireside Email.

1. When logged into Fireside Email, click Settings in the upper right-hand toolbar.
2. Click Settings in the Actions sidebar.
3. Click the “Add Setting” link on the lower-left hand side.
4. Type “UseEmailUrlBase” (no quotation marks) in the small box.
5. Type false in the large box.
6. Click Update.

If you would like to read more information on this feature or any others, please visit our Support pages.

Congressman Gohmert’s new website is sleek and easy to navigate.  Constituents of Texas’ 1st District will have no problem finding the information they want and need.