Keep a record of all those emails!
Those of your who have my read my blog over the last few weeks will know my initial reponse to the article about email overload - get a proper Contact Management system! Discussion about whether or not to integrate a solution with correspondence management systems misses the point - you need to record ALL your communications with a constituent etc. in one system, whether they are written, emailed or verbal.
However, having had to implement some email management systems in my time, I sympathize with Congress a bit on this one - it can prove to be a tricky task.
Outbound email should be relatively straightforward to integrate - even pretty basic Contact Management solutions will let you do that - either direct from the server via some pre-built server side integration, or with simple integration between the contact management system and your email client. Even Lotus Notes let me do this at my last company - and Lotus Notes is the hardest system to integrate known to man!
This is also true of bulk emails as well as individual emails. It should be possible to bring up any person you have contacted in the system and see what emails you sent them and when. This is great for when a congress person needs to due to meet with a constituent - they can then know what has been said on their behalf in the past, and the person in question will feel the congress person is interested in them as an individual.
Finally, if different offices (e.g. local and DC) are contacting constituents, those emails should be stored in the one central system, so the two offices are working in tandem, not in conflict with each other. This are several ways of doing this, but I am increasingly a fan of hosted solutions (sometimes called ASP systems), so that both offices are accessing the same single system, but it is maintained by a third party provider. [I will write more about this in a different post]
However, as you may have spotted, I have only discussed one side of the solution - but inbound email is a far bigger topic so I will save that for tomorrow!
Enjoy the fireworks!
However, having had to implement some email management systems in my time, I sympathize with Congress a bit on this one - it can prove to be a tricky task.
Outbound email should be relatively straightforward to integrate - even pretty basic Contact Management solutions will let you do that - either direct from the server via some pre-built server side integration, or with simple integration between the contact management system and your email client. Even Lotus Notes let me do this at my last company - and Lotus Notes is the hardest system to integrate known to man!
This is also true of bulk emails as well as individual emails. It should be possible to bring up any person you have contacted in the system and see what emails you sent them and when. This is great for when a congress person needs to due to meet with a constituent - they can then know what has been said on their behalf in the past, and the person in question will feel the congress person is interested in them as an individual.
Finally, if different offices (e.g. local and DC) are contacting constituents, those emails should be stored in the one central system, so the two offices are working in tandem, not in conflict with each other. This are several ways of doing this, but I am increasingly a fan of hosted solutions (sometimes called ASP systems), so that both offices are accessing the same single system, but it is maintained by a third party provider. [I will write more about this in a different post]
However, as you may have spotted, I have only discussed one side of the solution - but inbound email is a far bigger topic so I will save that for tomorrow!
Enjoy the fireworks!
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