EMS/EMT Ambulance & Rescue

The old website – and we wish we saved pictures – provided no value to the community and did not demonstrate the quality of services that the Town of Montgomery Ambulance actually provided to its Orange County NY service area. Before we do an appeal mailing for any Ambulance, Fire, EMS/EMT, Rescue or Police Benevolent Association, we check out the client’s “web presence”. Here, there wasn’t even a donation page, and that of course had to be part of the new build. CRST doesn’t recommend PayPal and partners with Stripe.com, largely because we can integrate it into our DonorJet.com software so that clients may be able to have received donations or contributions go directly into our software seamlessly. Along with developing a new website, we needed to help the Town of Montgomery Ambulance get non-profit approved with the U.S. Postal Service, and this was unfortunately a longer term process due to unforeseen finicky requirements made by the PCSC division of the USPS; we don’t charge for the service of assisting clients with non-profit approval, but ultimately, the relationship is between the client and the Postal Service, but we do help buttress the process through a “Letter of Guidance” as well as an online blog that we developed to assist qualified IRS 501(c) class organizations. After getting not-for-profit mailing privileges in place, the task with any EMS/EMT mailing is to get great images, and this is actually hard to do. When professional team members are in the field helping save lives, they don’t always have time (no surprise) to take pictures of what they’re doing.

Here, then, sometimes training exercises can provide similar and appropriate images to use. It is important that the overall mailing be thematically in line with the branding of the website, and, that everything works together. Even the DonorJet.com application needs to be set-up in advance to ensure that volunteers at the Rescue Squad are ready to accept contributions both via mail and via web. To save costs further here, we opted to use a full saturation mailing for both residents (occupant-residents) including all business owners. However, since there is often considerable wealth via secondary homeowners, we also sourced a list of real property owners using our proprietary CRST-RP datafilter to maximize the appeal. If the message is common sense, and the appeal is heartfelt, the community usually responds appropriately, as was the case for the Walden-Montgomery Orange County populace.