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Have you ever wondered whether your correspondence reports accurately represent your constituents? Or what the emails, phone calls and letters you receive can tell you about the typical constituent? Fireside is preparing new reports for offices to help them understand what their correspondence reports say about their constituents–both their districts as a whole and specific groups. We are working with a group of nonpartisan state universities who will be conducting opinion surveys in Fireside client office’s districts on our behalf. Using the data from these surveys, we will be able to provide you a confidential report that provides new detail on public opinion in your district among those who do and do not contact your office.

What will these reports include?

We will prepare a custom report for every participating office. This confidential report will detail:

  • How the views expressed in your constituent communications correspond with the views of other voters in your district: what do the people who don’t write your office think?
  • New data on what your constituents think, such as levels of support for various policy proposals
  • Analysis of which types of constituents tend to contact your office and which do not–and on which issues

Our goal is for this report to help you better contextualize the communication your office receives. For example, when you receive communication on an issue in the future, the report might reveal that there are even more constituents with an alternative view, but that these constituents do not contact your office as frequently.

This is a one-time trial, but your office’s feedback on this report will help us as we determine whether to integrate similar offerings into our platform on an ongoing basis.

How is the survey data being collected? What data is being shared & how will it be secured?

We have contracted with nonpartisan state universities (UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara) to collect the survey data on our behalf and help us prepare the reports. In order for them to collect the necessary data, we need your permission to securely and temporarily share the following data with researchers at these universities: anonymized form letters that will allow for categorizing the correspondence by issue; and a random sample of voter file data from your district to conduct the survey. We will never share any information about which constituents contacted you or the content of any constituents’ messages. All this data will be stored on a secure server, using leading end-to-end commercial encryption technology, and deleted after the reports are created.

In order to help all of our Client offices, including those who do not choose to participate, we may also share an anonymized, aggregate version of the data that results from this project with the universities so that they can create a public-facing report, which we will also share with your office. Any such anonymized, aggregate data we share will not identify Congressional offices nor individual constituents.

How can my office participate?

You should email nick@fireside21.com to express your interest or if you have questions. We will reach out with more specific information and can answer any remaining questions you might have. Your office can then provide consent for Fireside to share the data described above. We’ll also ask you to identify a contact in your office (such as an LC) who can answer questions from and serve as a liaison in case we have questions about your data.

Interested? Have questions? Please email nick@fireside21.com. We look forward to hearing from you!