Training Classes

iConstituent offers training on its family of products for users with varying degrees of experience and skill. For new users, two of our most popular classes include “The Basics of Correspondence” and “E-Newsletter Fundamentals.” With the arrival of summer interns space may be limited, so make sure you register for a class today by emailing training@iconstituent.com!

Training and Support Requirements Planning: This training session helps the training department at iConstituent to better assess the needs, expectations, and business processes of your office. For both new and existing offices, this pre-training introduction and planning initiative helps to identify the available resources for managing mail, organize and/or evaluate the process flow for importing and exporting correspondence, and mitigate any process conversion issues for upgrading offices or those coming from another vendor.

• Recommended For: Mailing Manager, Primary Mail Processors, System Administrators
• Prerequisite: n/a

Basics of Correspondence Management: This is a class designed to introduce the fundamentals of Capitol Correspond as a Constituent Management Software (CMS) and to introduce key terms that prepare users for more advanced features and concepts. Class will focus on the elements of an individual piece of correspondence that is received and how to log it, search for it, and reply to it. However, to ensure that correspondence management processes are clear and realistic, trainers will also address the key features of tracking and responding to large volumes of correspondence.

• Recommended For: New Users, Interns
• Prerequisite: n/a

Mass Correspondence Management: This class is designed to give students a clear understanding of how to sort, organize, and respond to large volumes of electronically-received correspondence. Students will learn the most efficient ways to find incoming messages with similar content, assign issue codes, draft response letters, and transmit responses.

• Recommended For: Primary Mail Processors, Legislative Correspondents
• Prerequisite: "The Basics of Correspondence Management"

Advanced Sorting: This class is designed to for users that process and pre-sort mail in order to quickly evaluate and assign the issue being addressed in each incoming message. The “Advanced Sorting” class helps users to take advantage of Capitol Correspond 8 features like the “Duplicate Constituent Check,” “Duplicate Message Check,” “Keywords,” and “Topic Routing,” which help to efficiently manage large numbers of correspondence and identify advocacy campaign mail and unique constituent concerns.

• Recommended For: Primary Mail Processors, Legislative Correspondents, Systems Administrators
• Prerequisite: "The Basics of Correspondence Management", "Mass Correspondence Management"

Capitol Correspond Outlook Scheduling Add-In: This brings added functionality to Outlook, like the ability to merge schedules into pre-formatted templates, search for and create contacts and constituents in the Capitol Correspond database from Outlook, and populate various appointment information into Congressionally-designed fields like “Speaking Request Purpose,” “Speaking Request Type,” and “Attending Staff.”

• Recommended For: Schedulers, Systems Administrators
• Prerequisite: n/a

Tours Management and Flags Management: These are classes designed to help users organize and standardize their requests and correspondence between constituent requestors and the types of flags and tours that contacts have requested. Capitol Correspond offers a way for offices to track requests and run customized saved searches on tour properties to help better identify the resources required.

• Recommended For: Staff Assistants, Front Office Staff
• Prerequisite: n/a

Casework Management: This is a class designed for staff members who work primarily with constituent inquiries that require multiple contacts and/or letters to be tracked in a single entity, or case. Casework may also require capturing additional constituent information like date of birth and social security number, extensive notes, and follow-up inquiries on behalf of the Member office. Users will learn how to create a case, create departments and organizations to add to the case, and take extensive notes and comments about activities that occur throughout the duration of a case.

• Recommended For: Staff Assistants, Front Office Staff
• Prerequisite: n/a

Electronic Approval Management: This class teaches users to review, revise, make comments, and track changes to draft response letters using Capitol Corresponds paperless Workflow utility. Workflow allows users to create pre-defined tasks and assign each task to a staff member in the office that is responsible for assuring that a response is fully approved and finalized before it is available as a response to constituent inquiries and opinions.

• Recommended For: Legislative Assistants, Mail Managers, and Systems Administrators (New Offices)
• Prerequisite: "The Basics of Correspondence Management"

Systems Administration Management: This is a course designed to teach system maintenance, functionality, and security. Class will cover a range of features, including but not limited to, the purpose and maintenance of System Settings, creating and inactivating system codes, creating and inactivating staff members, running system-wide Duplicate Checks, archiving and recovering records, running default reports, and creating customized search queries.

• Recommended For: Systems Administrators
• Prerequisite: "The Basics of Correspondence Management," "Mass Correspondence Management," "Advanced Sorting"

E-Newsletter Fundamentals: This course teaches you to effectively create and distribute an e-newsletter to all of your constituents. Participants will learn basic list management, which includes the ability to create and modify contacts as required. Class will focus on creating newsletter content, including text, hyperlinks, and images. Users will also learn how to effectively use final design variables like how to modify the e-newsletter’s text version and how to attach “Points of Interest” to constituent profile pages. “Points of Interest” will later allow you to search for all of the constituents interested in specific topics and create a new list using their profile attributes.