This new search will help you find people faster than ever before and it is the best way to log in phone calls. Here’s how it works: when you go to the People App of your Fireside CRM account, you will now see one big search box instead of the old search. Just start typing and get ready to see your results! You can type any combination of name, address, phone number, email or organization — in any order — to instantly narrow down your search results.

The technology that powers this search is quite advanced and lends itself to the unique way we manage customer accounts and data on the Hill. No other vendor on the Hill has the technology or capability to support a search this fast and powerful! This new feature is a result of the hard work of Mark Soldavini who originally conceived of the idea and experimented with new search technologies during a “FedEx” developer day here last May.

Thank you, and we hope you love this new feature!

We have examined your account history to automatically tag your existing forms with either the “MailRoom” or “Casework” tag. This will really simplify things, especially for caseworkers, but we may need to help you in re-tagging some forms or help you in finding something that doesn’t appear where it used to! Thanks to all our caseworkers whose feedback led to this new feature!

Attach Files to MailRoom Emails
Outbound correspondence emails now support attaching files such as CRS Reports and PDF forms. Once an email has been sent the list of attachments can not be modified. At this point, this is only supported within individual pieces of mail and not form letters nor batch mass updates.

More Mail History
Previously, mail history only included entries for staff assignment and status changes. It now also includes entries for the following:

• Mail being added or removed from a batch
• Form letter being customized/uncustomized
• Customized letters being edited
• Form changed from one to another
• Letter printed/Email sent

Network Printing From Casework *
Selecting print from a Casework letter now gives you the option to print to network printers or to download the document for local printing. The dialog explains how to have a network printer setup for your office.

* This functionality may need to be enabled for you by Fireside21.

Casework

Daily reminders email
Caseworkers will now receive an email from the Fireside CRM in the morning listing cases with reminders set for that day.

A new sorting option in My Cases
There is now a Modified header in My Cases that you can use to sort cases to find cases you were recently working on.

Send an email notification when you re-assign a case
When creating a new case or changing the assignment of an existing case you can now opt to send a notification to the person the case has been assigned to. When changing assignments you can include a note that will be sent with the notification.

Attach files to case emails
Email activities can have file attachments, such as PDFs, Word Documents, etc., that are sent with the email.

Mail Room

Smarter response “type” selector
Fireside CRM will not let you log an email to a person who does not have an email address. Similarly the response type can not be changed later to email. Same behavior for phone numbers. Letters however will allow you to log or change type for users without a postal address after viewing a warning. This is to support the case where a letter just needs to be printed for proof-reading purposes.

Digital mail previews
You can now view the contents of digital mail (the text and image version) right from the outbound page (response) for the correspondence.

Goal 2: Increase Mail Room Speed

Context menu

Context menus now appear when you click on any of the rows in most of our mailroom lists. The new menus provide faster access to common functions unique to each list.

Progress indicator

In this latest Mail Room enhancement we’ve added a progress indicator to let you know when page is doing something that might take a second or two.

Bulk mailing performance improvements

We made it faster! Plus, we have updated the Bulk Mail page to list all past mailings as opposed to just the most recent items.

1. Make it easier to find items that you “own”
2. Increase Mail Room Speed
3. Provide a consistent user interface throughout the Mail Room

Goal: Make it easier to find items that you “own”

Manage your batches from My Mail

Sometimes you just want to see the mail that’s in your batches without having to sort through all of the batches that ever existed. Now you can do just that from the My Mail screen. You can also perform common batch operations like “Print/Send” and “Modify” from within My Mail.

Back button support for all pages and filtering options

You can now reliably use your back button or mailroom tabs to return to previously filtered content. We’ve added a “Reset Filters” button so that you can always go back to the default filter set.

Mail Summary on the top of list pages

So that you’ve always got a view of how much mailroom work you’ve got on your plate, we’ve added a handy summary to the top of every list page which allows you to quickly reach your assignments.

Check back soon to see the features we implemented for our remaining goals!

Goal 3: Provide a consistent user interface throughout the Mail Room

Standardized filtering

The new filtering panel on the left side of many lists allows you to easily see, at a glance, how many items of various types are your lists. You can also use the filtering panel to narrow down your lists, hiding and showing items based on common characteristics.

Improved column organization

So that you can more easily see at a glance what is in each list, we’ve cleaned up the column organization, putting the most important elements first and reducing some of the clutter within the columns.

Improved visualization of expanded list views

When you expand a row in the My Mail, Email Inbox or Batch Mail sections, you should now see an easier to read format that mimics a typical email conversation. We’ve also added a few extra fields to make it easier to copy/paste from this section.

Standardized toolbar

Our new toolbar gives you easy and consistent access to all of the common list operations like “Expand”, “Select All” and “Create.”

If you click on the link, you will be taken to our new Requests website. This site will allow you to view outstanding requests for your office, past requests (from the launch of this new feature forward), status updates, and includes an area to submit suggestions for our platform. In addition to this new website, we have launched a new email address (request@fireside21.com) that should be used for submitting programming requests and fixes. This new email address notifies multiple team members of a new request and will help decrease our response times!

Take a look around the new Requests site and let us know if you have any questions or suggestions in our chat room or in the Suggestions area of the new website.

Our development team has rolled out frequent updates to the CRM platform this year based on client feedback, and you can keep track of these updates in the “What We’ve Been Doing” sidebar of eManager. We’ve rolled out another very exciting update to all CRM accounts. Now, when logging in any kind of correspondence (phone call, email, letter, walk-in meeting) you will be able to upload attachments. This will be particularly useful for:

1. Paper letters/postcards
2. Constituent faxes
3. Letter enclosures

Rather than having to keep track of those paper records or manually entering in the content of a letter, you can scan them, attach them, and recycle! This will save you time and energy when you need to log anything in and also prevents you from having to pass around pieces of paper along with mail assignments. Now your office can spend less time logging in mail and more time responding. Try it out the next time you log a piece of correspondence–your interns will thank you!

If you have feedback for our platform, hop into our chat room and let us know!  As a result of the feedback we’ve received, we have made a number of updates to the platform including last week’s addition of the contact form auto-response email message.