Blog

I’m excited to announce that the Democracy Fund has given Fireside21 a $100,000 grant to explore the application of machine learning in our constituent relationship management platform.

Machine learning is a technology that’s now being widely used in the commercial space. When you shop on Amazon and see suggestions for related products, that’s machine learning in action. When Spotify...

Summertime means the Hill is a quiet place, so at Fireside21 our development team takes advantage of the lull and seizes the opportunity to crank out new features. This year we continued our tradition of hosting programming interns, and instead of one or two we kicked it up a notch by selecting 3 terrific college...

The programming team LOVES the summertime because Congress is out of session and they got some alone time to crank on new features. Another exciting part of summer is our internship program, when we take on a couple of promising computer science students to work on software projects. Here’s a quick update on the class of 2015:

Zach Jiron, Junior at UMD (Left) This was Zach’s second time applying...

This summer we leveled up and took on 3 interns! Summer is the time to catch our breath after the springtime sprint to bring new offices on board, and work on programming projects that we don’t usually have time for during the hectic congressional cycle. Here are some details on our interns and what they worked on over the summer (from left to right):

Cy Neita, Junior from UMD...

It is hard to believe it, but Ken started at our company 10 years ago this month. Ken was fresh off the Hill and looking for a job in the tech field, and wound up at what was then Adfero, where he started out in the account staff working on managing campaigns and online strategy.

I worked with Ken over email and chat for 6 months before meeting him in person on my first day at the company. After...

Our search for summer programming interns started with 85 applications, 16 on campus interviews, and an invitation to our office for the lucky 8 finalists. After running the gantlet of our programming test, and a thorough grilling from all our programmers, we chose our two favorites: Andrew (pictured below, left), a Sophomore from UMD, and Patrick (right), a Junior from UMD. Congrats to them for...

We have received a number of calls and emails from clients about last night's hacker attack on Congressional web sites. First of all, no Fireside21 client web sites were impacted by this attack.

I don't know for sure exactly how these sites got hacked—I would just be speculating without conducting an audit of server logs. I do want to take this opportunity to re-assure our clients of things we do...

Last Monday was a rare opportunity to get all the developers in the office out on a field trip. We went to the highly anticipated DevDays DC which featured the popular programming blogger Joel Spolsky.

It was a great time to get out and hear some—respected speakers and learn about new technology and techniques. Even though a lot of the technology, like iPhone apps and Google App Engine, were...

This week we enabled Secure Socket Layers (SSL) encryption on your eManager account. SSL is the same technology used by banks and online shopping sites like amazon to protect your personal information that is transferred between your computer and the website.

This is just one of several mechanisms we have been implementing to make your account's content and constituent data more secure.

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Last week we pushed up a refactored version of eManager's audience tools. Refactored is fancy computer speak for taking stock of everything you have learned and then overhauling the code to work better.

That’s right ”ñ 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...