Capitol Impact continues to build on its software theme of better communication and more functionality for lobbyists that need to track legislation. With the start of the 2014 legislative session right around the corner in all states we will be releasing the following upgrades to our legislative tracking system.
SWEEP STATE LEGISLATION SIX (6) TIMES PER DAY
More and more states are updating legislation multiple times per day as they change their software and utilize environments that allow them to publish information more frequently. As a result, Capitol Impact is now using a service that allows us to update state and federal legislation every 4 hours starting at 4 AM every day. Using this technology we can now provide near-real-time updates as legislation moves within a committee or between chambers. What this means to our clients is that at any time during the day they may see a new status on their bills, not having to wait until the next day for changes to appear.
NEW EMAIL NOTIFICATION TO CLIENTS AS BILLS ARE UPDATED
Clients of the Capitol Impact state legislative Tracking system may now have up to five people in their organization be notified when bills in their portfolio of tracked bills have a change in status. This new feature will compare the status of bills from the sweep to the bills you have been tracking. Any bills that have changed in status from the last update will be included in an email. You will get one email showing all bills that changed in status. Each new sweep cycle may generate a new email with a new list of bills, and will not include bills that were in a previous email, meaning you are always getting the most recent changes from the process. You may designate up to five individuals to receive this email notification, and the Capitol Impact team will set them into your system setup.
NEW EMAIL COMMUNICATIONS TOOLS TO REQUEST INPUT FROM MEMBERS/COLLEAGUES/STAFF
Lobbyists often rely on the expertise of others to help them shape the response to legislation. This involves communicating bill information to people and asking for their input. When there is a set of bills that need input and a group of people that you want the input from, it can be very time consuming to communicate what you want as each person needs an email with the list of bills and some means of getting to the text of those bills. With the new Multiple person/Multiple Bill tool, you may save the contact information for anyone in the PEOPLE contact management database provided with your Capitol Impact State Legislative Tracking System and pull a list of people from the PEOPLE database, a list of bills from your Tracking system, and let the application create an email for each person in the list that hyperlinks to the bills you are tracking. You send the email and all they do is click the hyperlink to the bill. At their fingertips they can read the text, then click the POST YOUR COMMENTS button and input their response which is then stored for you with the bill and you are notified that they have responded. The entire feedback loop is complete with one simple application.
NEW REPORT TOOL FOR CREATING YOUR LEGISLATIVE SUMMARY
We have built into the system an application to create a report with text, images and bill lists. Lobbyists spend a great deal of time creating reports explaining what is happening at the capitol and providing a list of key legislation that they are monitoring. Then this report is made into an email or a PDF and sent off to the folks that need it. Within the Capitol Impact system there is now a Legislative Report application that provides for adding lists of bills and creating sections to group the bills, adding text to an introduction and to each bill section if needed. Then you can email the report to any group in your PEOPLE database, or make a word document or PDF from the final report. Each bill in the report is hyperlinked back to your tracking system so with a single click, your audience can view the bill. Each week, come back, and change the bills being watched, change section heading or use the same ones and do it all again with new text.
MORE FUNCTIONALITY AND BETTER PRICING
Capitol Impact continues to license our legislative tracking system to an organization, not by the seat. For one flat fee, your organization can have unlimited users of the system. This has proven to be much more cost effective for client’s who in the past may be paying per seat,especially if they have 5 or 7 users. Capitol Impact’s system has better communications tools, better feedback mechanisms and costs less.