iConstituent:The Digital Communications Chaperone

When one sees how a rebellious visionary brought the underground culture to television in the 80s and 90s with his show ‘Night Flight’, there is an almost immediate double-back when the realization hits that the same man is an IT innovator today. Stuart Shapiro, now President of iConstituent, brings a slice of nostalgia to every retro teenager with the greatest rock and roll hits and punk showcases of the time being aired on his show, overthrowing boring tennis reruns, or even worse, dead air on television in the late hours. A closer inspection reveals that the young man displayed a specific adroitness back in the day—understanding exactly what the generation wanted and how television networks can stay aligned to that.

His current company, iConstituent provides online communication services to nearly 40 percent of the United States Congress. Juxtapose that with the fact that the US Senate approved Facebook as a recognized channel of outreach just half a decade ago, one will notice that the public sector is taking toddler steps towards digital communication, and iConstituent helps them make the journey to full realization. In essence, while Shapiro has definitely transitioned drastically in profession, his core skill still continues to play a big role in the company’s success—understanding exactly what the generation wants and how the government can stay aligned to that. To prove that point, here’s a quote from him about his yesteryears, “I felt, and I still feel to this day, that it was a spiritual mission of providing a cultural view on a world that we knew existed.”

In the bid to help governments keep pace with an ever-connected public, iConstituent delivers its flagship solution—the Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) platform, which integrates and syncs with Outlook, Gmail, or domiciliary email systems.

Statistics can be extremely helpful in making decisions that will revolutionize the interactions between elected officials and the public

The unique advantage it offers to case workers and managers at government citizen outreach centers is the ability to gain a meaningful view out of thousands of mails received through these third-party systems and filters out segments based on the subject.Key templates for each of these segments can be reused by the user for efficient and time-saving processing of the numerous citizen queries. The additional ability to extract progress reports and tracking cases from the complete history of conversations is another feature most welcomed by caseworkers.

The CRM integrates seamlessly with iConstituent’s e-Newsletter that helps public offices tap into popular social networks and leverage analytical tools to track efficiency of their outreach programs. Creation, dispatch, sharing, and tracking of customized content—all these essential stages can be accomplished from the iConstituent platform at scale. Demographics, and behavioral and activity data helps the platform provide micro-targeting features to the user, who can track the results in a powerful and intuitive manner. The customized templates for content ranges from survey questions to citizen engagement campaigns, and each entity can be tracked from dispatch using up to 65 configurable reports.

Apart from the platform, iConstituent displays expertise in organizing telephone town halls and optimizing social media hits for public offices. Working with over 400 congressional offices in their digital communication efforts, the company has an in-depth perception of the social media presence of Capitol Hill. Beholding this understanding, Shapiro states, “The technology will help office’s understand who are sharing on Facebook or participating in social media and build a profile of constituents. This is very useful data because statistics can be extremely helpful in making decisions that will revolutionize the interactions between elected officials and the public.”