There is one undeniable truth every Legislative Correspondent comes to understand: Congressional offices deal with mountains of constituent mail. Whether it’s individual messages, massive advocacy campaigns or even digitized paper letters, sorting and logging the mail in your Inbox requires a tremendous amount of time. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to boost your efficiency by automatically logging and sorting mail?
Our developers thought so, too.
Automate Your Inbox
One of the best features included in the new Fireside CRM Inbox is the ability to create Automations. Automations are routing rules that can be generated on the fly to automatically repeat actions and log certain types of mail. If you receive advocacy emails about grey wolves or immigration daily, now you only have to log that campaign once and you will have the option to always log it with your selected criteria. In the future, all emails that match that campaign will skip the Inbox entirely, be tagged with the proper Issues and Affiliations, and go to your batch and staffer of choice. You only have to decide how to log a campaign or type of mail once – Fireside will automatically log the rest for you going forward.
That’s great, but it gets even better.
You can also create Automations for future campaigns and inbound messages. Does your office want certain issues assigned to particular staffers? Do you want to batch correspondence by subject lines? Do you want to manage emails a particular way based on frequency or history? The Inbox will automatically log, sort and assign all of that for you.
Take Back Your Time
By far the coolest thing about the new Inbox Automations is how much time this will save you. After the new Inbox made its debut this Fall, offices immediately began to reap the benefits of Inbox Automations.
During the first full month of using the Inbox, Fireside users were just beginning to see the benefits of Automations. Leveraging its efficiency-boosting power, many offices were able to automate at least 15% of incoming correspondence, with one office boasting as much as 67% of their mail was automated!
When you examine the most prolific Automation-enthusiasts, the results are even more impressive.
Over the course of 30 days, early adopting Congressional offices were able to log 1,000, 1,500 or even 3,000 pieces of mail with the help of Automations. It’s one thing to understand conceptually that mail automation could be helpful, but it’s quite another to see how much time it’s saving your neighbors on the Hill. With all the time Automations can save, you will be able to focus on your important legislative priorities instead of endlessly logging and batching mail manually. It’s the ultimate set it and forget it.