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.