Fireside21

New Fireside CRM Instant Person Search

Ken — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:41:01 +0000

We’ve been working hard on a new Instant Person Search for our Fireside CRM and we’ve launched it this week as the default search for all of our CRM clients. We are always looking for ways to make the Fireside CRM simpler, faster and better and we’re very excited about this new search. I wanted to thank many of you who gave us great feedback after being invited to a preview this new tool.

This new search will help you find people faster than ever before and it is the best way to log in phone calls. Here’s how it works: when you go to the People App of your Fireside CRM account, you will now see one big search box instead of the old search. Just start typing and get ready to see your results! You can type any combination of name, address, phone number, email or organization — in any order — to instantly narrow down your search results.

The technology that powers this search is quite advanced and lends itself to the unique way we manage customer accounts and data on the Hill. No other vendor on the Hill has the technology or capability to support a search this fast and powerful! This new feature is a result of the hard work of Mark Soldavini who originally conceived of the idea and experimented with new search technologies during a “FedEx” developer day here last May.

Thank you, and we hope you love this new feature!

Leverage the State of the Union to Build Your Email Subscribers

Ken — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:10:36 +0000

This week’s State of the Union is one of the most high profile events on the Congressional calendar. It presents a perfect opportunity to reach out to your constituents and build your email subscriber count.

Here’s How

As we have said before, a web survey is the best way to capture feedback and email subscriptions from constituents. For the SOTU, put together a short survey, perhaps just one yes/no question:

Did you like the ideas President Obama proposed in his SOTU address?

Additionally, you’ll want to require email address, and perhaps first name, last name and address. Finally, add your opt-in field to ask if folks would like to receive updates from your office.

Then prep a short email with about 100 words and a link to your survey. You will wan to send this to your ‘all emails’ list. Since this will be sent to non-subscribers, this will need to be franked, but all this can be set up today in about 15 minutes.

Both the email and survey could certainly be a more complex, but keeping it short and generic will let you get this done quickly with ample time to get franking approval.

Share a comment later this week letting us know how many new subscribers you collected?

Related Fireside Web and Email tutorials:

Tag Your Case Form Letters and Keep Them Separate

Ken — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:12:28 +0000

You can now separate the form letters that you use within the MailRoom from forms that you use for Casework. When creating or editing a form letter, you can select whether the form is available Anywhere, within the MailRoom, or within the Casework tools. Additionally, the Casework section of site now has its own Form letters tab where you can directly access the forms exclusively tagged as Case forms.

We have examined your account history to automatically tag your existing forms with either the “MailRoom” or “Casework” tag. This will really simplify things, especially for caseworkers, but we may need to help you in re-tagging some forms or help you in finding something that doesn’t appear where it used to! Thanks to all our caseworkers whose feedback led to this new feature!

Better Casework Printing and New MailRoom Features

Ken — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:42:41 +0000

We recently launched a couple of enhancements to our Fireside CRM based on our client’s feedback. Keep the good ideas coming!

Attach Files to MailRoom Emails
Outbound correspondence emails now support attaching files such as CRS Reports and PDF forms. Once an email has been sent the list of attachments can not be modified. At this point, this is only supported within individual pieces of mail and not form letters nor batch mass updates.

More Mail History
Previously, mail history only included entries for staff assignment and status changes. It now also includes entries for the following:

Mail being added or removed from a batch
Form letter being customized/uncustomized
Customized letters being edited
Form changed from one to another
Letter printed/Email sent

Network Printing From Casework *
Selecting print from a Casework letter now gives you the option to print to network printers or to download the document for local printing. The dialog explains how to have a network printer setup for your office.

* This functionality may need to be enabled for you by Fireside21.

A Few Enhancements for Casework and Mailroom Tools

Ken — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:12:00 +0000

We recently launched some pretty great enhancements to the Fireside CRM Casework and Mailroom tools. Here’s a quick overview:

Casework

Daily reminders email
Caseworkers will now receive an email from the Fireside CRM in the morning listing cases with reminders set for that day.

A new sorting option in My Cases
There is now a Modified header in My Cases that you can use to sort cases to find cases you were recently working on.

Send an email notification when you re-assign a case
When creating a new case or changing the assignment of an existing case you can now opt to send a notification to the person the case has been assigned to. When changing assignments you can include a note that will be sent with the notification.

Attach files to case emails
Email activities can have file attachments, such as PDFs, Word Documents, etc., that are sent with the email.

Mail Room

Smarter response “type” selector
Fireside CRM will not let you log an email to a person who does not have an email address. Similarly the response type can not be changed later to email. Same behavior for phone numbers. Letters however will allow you to log or change type for users without a postal address after viewing a warning. This is to support the case where a letter just needs to be printed for proof-reading purposes.

Digital mail previews
You can now view the contents of digital mail (the text and image version) right from the outbound page (response) for the correspondence.

Rep. Crawford’s Fresh New Website

JeNaye — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:43:40 +0000

Rep. Crawford’s new website highlights all of the most important content right on the homepage. Visitors can quickly make requests to the office, sign up for the e-newsletter, and catch up on the latest news.

Fireside CRM Updates: Making It Faster

Scott — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:17:17 +0000

In our last post, we mentioned the big updates that we recently launched to the Fireside CRM and our goals to improve the user experience. Our next goal is something that we work on all the time–not just with big updates.

Goal 2: Increase Mail Room Speed

Context menu

Context menus now appear when you click on any of the rows in most of our mailroom lists. The new menus provide faster access to common functions unique to each list.

Progress indicator

In this latest Mail Room enhancement we’ve added a progress indicator to let you know when page is doing something that might take a second or two.

Bulk mailing performance improvements

We made it faster! Plus, we have updated the Bulk Mail page to list all past mailings as opposed to just the most recent items.

BIG Updates to the Fireside CRM

JeNaye — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 17:31:52 +0000

More clients have migrated to our Fireside CRM than any other platform over the last two years, but we’re not resting on this success. Over the past few months we have been working on some big updates to the list views within the Mail Room module of the Fireside CRM with three goals in mind:

Make it easier to find items that you “own”
Increase Mail Room Speed
Provide a consistent user interface throughout the Mail Room

Goal: Make it easier to find items that you “own”

Manage your batches from My Mail

Sometimes you just want to see the mail that’s in your batches without having to sort through all of the batches that ever existed. Now you can do just that from the My Mail screen. You can also perform common batch operations like “Print/Send” and “Modify” from within My Mail.

Back button support for all pages and filtering options

You can now reliably use your back button or mailroom tabs to return to previously filtered content. We’ve added a “Reset Filters” button so that you can always go back to the default filter set.

Mail Summary on the top of list pages

So that you’ve always got a view of how much mailroom work you’ve got on your plate, we’ve added a handy summary to the top of every list page which allows you to quickly reach your assignments.

Check back soon to see the features we implemented for our remaining goals!

Spark Wrap Up: Franking Rules & Regulations

Ken — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 23:07:55 +0000

Today was the final session in our 2011 Spark Workshop series. Thanks to you all for coming out to these events and for all of the feedback you had for our team.

We covered a lot of material today and since we didn’t produce a packet like the last couple of workshops, I waned to be sure to post both the slide deck and “cheat sheet” right away:

Thanks again, and please leave your comments here about topics for 2012 Spark Workshops!

Two Fireside21 Clients Win CMF Platinum Mouse Awards

Ken — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 22:53:23 +0000

Congratulations to all of our clients who won Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze Mouse Awards for having the best websites on Capitol Hill! Year after year, more Fireside21 clients receive this recognition than any other vendor.

Just like the Congressional Management Foundation, we’d like to single out Rep. Paul Ryan and the Committee on Education and Workforce for being awarded the Platinum Mouse for the #1 House Member and #1 Committee website. Here’s a list of all our award-winning clients:

Platinum (Best in Class)

Gold (A+)

Silver (A)

Bronze (A-)