The Fireside21’s Spark Workshops will cover a range of topics that are important to congressional offices: website management, enewsletters, telephone townhalls, constituent mail and casework. We live and breathe this stuff and want to share our tips and wisdom to help you become more productive and responsive to the demands in a modern congressional office. You’ll find information about the first Spark Workshop below. Click here to register for any of our upcoming workshops.

Get the Most out of Email
September 23 at 2pm – Room 2360, Rayburn HOB

Growing your opt-in lists and communicating via email is a requirement for your office. This is your opportunity to learn from the experts at Fireside21 about what works and what you need to avoid to maximize your email outreach. Register here.

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.

If you haven’t used the Single Page View yet, you will see that it contains all of the same information as the Wizard View, but it is presented on one page. It is much easier to keep track of all of the information contained in the email without having to click back and forth between various steps.

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.

As we mentioned in our recent security post, you need to be on the House network to access your account, but you don’t physically need to be on the Hill to connect.

The House provides a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service that when combined with an HIR-provided SecurID allows you to securely connect to the House network from anywhere. If you don’t already have a SecurID, you will need to fill out a form on this HouseNet page.

By the way, this iPhone screenshot is real. There is a built-in VPN on all iPhones…and here’s a trick to take screenshots: press the Sleep/Wake and Home buttons at the same time and you’ll find a screenshot in your photo library.

Take a look when you send out your next email and click the “Single Page View” link next to the “Create/Edit a Message” page title.

We hope you like this new feature and it helps you send your emails even faster with Fireside Email!

That’s right – the code that powers your targeted audiences is brand new!

Why did we do this?

Well, Fireside Email is more popular than ever: we have sent over 20 million emails on behalf of our clients. This is actually the second time we have refactored the audience mechanisms. Each time was a result of learning from the systems we had in production to make things work faster.

I guess you could call it preventative maintenance. As a result, you should notice several pages in eManager loading more quickly and large email audiences will deliver more efficiently.

We also built this new code with several future enhancements in mind. Stayed tuned for some exciting new features!

What a missed opportunity!

Offices spend a lot of money to acquire email addresses and a lot of time to build up trust with those constituent to eventually get a formal opt-in.  Here was a missed opportunity to capture hundreds and maybe thousands of new email subscribers in just a couple of days and for free!

Many of our clients utilize Fireside Web and Email’s survey tools to help out when key votes are coming to the floor.  These surveys quickly aggregate opinions that can be reported to the Congressman.  Here’s how:

1. Have an internal discussion of how you want to phrase the survey.  Just ask a yes or no question?  Potentially ask the constituent a series of questions like, “which of the following components or amendments do you support?”
2. Publish the survey on your web site, feature it on your homepage and send out an email alert to your constituents asking for their feedback.
3. Additionally, send the link around to your staff list with a script and instructions to collect the information over the phone.
4. When the calls start to hit, your staff can take constituents’ information over the phone and enter it into the web site survey.

Here is a sample script:

Thank you for calling with your concerns on this issue.  First, do you support or oppose the bill?  Okay, please let me know if you support any of the following provisions…

Thanks again for your feedback.  Would you like to receive a response from the Congressman on this issue?

[Collect name, email and address]

Would you like to receive email alerts on this and other important topics from the Congressman?

[Collect email, check the subscribe box]

This tactic is going to yield your office a lot of new opt-ins and it also greatly simplifies the data entry for staffers.  I know that sometime when there are a lot of calls, some constituents’ opinions don’t get recorded at all.

Be sure your office doesn’t miss out on this opportunity in the future!

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.

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.