Slow email response times and an endless stream of vacation photos on social media might make you think summer is the worst time to communicate with your district. But look at it from another point of view, and you’ll find that the summer’s typical policy slowdown presents a great opportunity to focus on responding to and engaging with constituents. Use the summer months to set up more efficient processes, catch up on backlogged requests, and build rapport with your electorate. Read on to learn how technology can help you communicate more quickly, effectively, and consistently.
1. Get Your Data Integrated
As you manage the communications lifecycle between your constituents and office, you need to be thoroughly informed during each step. A fully integrated platform such as Fireside shares all the relevant data you need across the same database. You can view and use complete constituent profiles from your mailroom, outreach, or casework tools, rather than having to manually bridge the gap between siloed platforms. That saves you time and brings a professional edge to your communication work that constituents will appreciate.
2. Build the Best Newsletters
A state-of-the-art newsletter editor, such as Fireside’s Message Builder, prioritizes ease of use and performance while reaping all the benefits of our relational database mentioned above. That lets you create a functional and streamlined environment to do the important work — creating and sending messages to your constituents.
Constituent newsletters play a lead role in your brand portfolio, the stakes are high for getting yours right. Here are five best practices to make sure you nail it, every time.
3. Create Messages Quickly
Speed and efficiency are a premium when you’re issuing thousands of emails. When you draft a letter in Fireside’s Message Builder, our drag-and-drop interface makes things easy and intuitive. Plus, you’ll save time on formatting, because our tool translates your newsletters seamlessly to mobile devices.
4. Measure Performance
You have to work fast, so slow send times shouldn’t hold you up. You should look for a platform with email performance that’s comparable to leading cloud providers like MailChimp. Most of Fireside’s emails go out in under 10 minutes, with larger sends trending at around an hour.
5. Win the Mailroom Sorting Battle
For many staffers, sorting and managing mail can become a huge time-suck. A robust platform should cut down on as much mailroom time as possible. Fireside makes that happen thanks to two key features:
Mailroom Automation
Sorting and replying to campaign mail is a lesson in tedium. These messages, which comprise 70-80 percent of mail volume, need the same form letter, tags, and batch for each iteration. Our shortcut is the “Do This Always” button, which will automatically process incoming messages for specific campaigns based on how you’ve done it in the past, freeing you up to focus on the personalized communications you receive from constituents.
Sort and Filter Capabilities
Since the mailroom database houses such large swaths of information, you need a way to navigate through mail quickly and intuitively. Fireside’s robust filtering system ensures you’ll be able to easily find communications so that no piece of constituent correspondence goes unanswered.
6. Build Targeted Audiences Using Data
When building targeted audiences for outreach, you need constituent data that can interact with all of your systems. With a fully integrated platform, you can build audiences using data that originates in any part of the tool, rather than being limited to data housed in an external audience builder. For example, with Fireside, data you collect organically from surveys gets automatically funneled back into the database. From there, you can create new targeted audiences based on constituent responses.
7. Manage Casework’s Multi-Way Conversations
Processing unique, multi-way conversations on which caseworkers spend their time requires tools with superb organization and an intuitive layout. When you communicate between constituents, caseworkers, and contacts or agencies, message threads can get convoluted with email chains and attachments. Fireside’s casework messaging tools keep track of integral pieces of communication while making sure documents or whole cases don’t fall through the cracks.
See how easy managing your constituents, casework, and outreach can be with Fireside.