Turning around your Mail in less than two days with Fireside

Many of the congressional offices using Fireside proudly state that they are able to turn around mail in two days or less. We’ve talked to the staff in these offices about how they use the system and leverage its tools to not just reactively respond to constituents but create relationships with them. Thanks to this quick turnaround, they’ve been able to create powerful, aggressive, proactive mailing programs that wouldn’t be possible with any other system.

Here are some of their top tips:

Streamline your letter editing process

Many offices save time by having their chief or member personally review outgoing letters only when a major national issue or something specific to the district is involved. In all other cases, the legislative correspondent or legislative assistant typically drafts the messages and the legislative director edits them.

Automate your logging process

As the only vendor that presorts your mail into the categories of personalized web-form messages, campaigns, and handwritten mail, we make it easy for you to focus on automating your responses. Offices that follow this process send messages every morning when they log into their accounts, responding to all mail that has been automatically logged since the previous morning. This means most people get responses to their messages in less than a day. You can automate your mail classification by a variety of criteria, including:

Identifying macro issues versus micro issues

Offices turning around mail within two days have a system for identifying which mail items deal with macro issues and can receive a generalized response versus which deal with micro issues and require a more specific reply. These rules often correspond to what is particularly important to the district. For example:

Want to get on the fast track to turning around mail quickly in Fireside? We’ll come to your office to coach your staff on this process.