At BillTrack50 our mission is to make it as easy as possible for people to find and share information about legislation. If you find yourself trying to track down specific bills, or wanting to look at trends across states or across time, we want to help. BillTrack50 is a great tool for researching current legislation and we can also help you easily embed bill information, or lists, tables, or maps of bills into your posts. Read on for some top tips on how to get started.
1) Research Legislation
To create your first saved search click on “Start a Free Trial” on the top navigation bar. This gives you 30 days of unlimited access to our paid features, completely no obligation.
Then click on the left navigation bar on Bill Sheet for it to drop down “view all” then click on “view all” for the “new sheet” button to appear.
Now, choose a name for your sheet and hit create.
Next on the query tab, you can click '52 items selected' to narrow it down to just certain states, or leave it as 52 items to search everywhere. Federal bills are listed under United States (US) and D.C. city bills are also included. Being able to search many states at once lets you look at legislative trends across the country.
Click 'Add bill text search condition' to enter keywords that would make a bill interesting to you. Notice you have the chance to say if “any” of the words are good enough, or if they are “all” required, or if you want to exclude bills that contain that word or phrase ('none of'). Put phrases in quote marks " " and use the wildcard to search for families of words (e.g. 'tax*' will find 'tax', 'taxes', 'taxation' etc.). You can preview your search if you now by clicking 'Save' at the bottom. You’ll be able to fine-tune your search later.
You’ll notice the query tab has quite a number of options. Including filters where you can choose the bill type, bill progress, time period (which defaults to current sessions), committees category and bill sponsor. You can also add bills manually if you know the bill number. You can toggle the time filter from the default to the session timeline if you want to look at trends over time.
If you do choose to review older bills it might be helpful to check out our template post explaining how to create a template. You can then add a column showing you the session each bill was introduced in. You can also add columns for your own personal notes. For much more detail on creating your first search in our getting started post here.
Click Save at the bottom to see your bill sheet.
That’s it, you’re done. You have created a bill sheet. Notice the various tabs across the top allowing you to review your bills, see bills you've chosen to hide, tweak your query, set up alerts, take advantage of our sharing widgets, and manage your settings.
At the bottom you have export buttons allowing you to export the bill sheet to Excel or in .CSV format, create a PDF report, show a map of the distribution of the bills and see a list of AI-generated bills that are similar to the bills in your bill sheet.
Note that the bill sheet also includes a column with an AI generated plain English summary of the bill.
If you already know the bill number of the bill you want to read, you want to search the current sessions, and you aren’t going to want to save your search and go back to it, you can always just enter the number into the quick search box at the top or on the side. You can also search for legislators and committees.
2) Share a Bill or a List of Bills
Once you have found a bill, or several bills, you would like to write about, it’s easy to share. For sharing a single bill, click on the bill number to get to the bill detail page. Once you are on the bill detail page you can just use the BillTrack50 link (example: https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/1691648); that link will always point to the same bill. We will update various bits of information, like add a new bill text or the latest votes, but the bill link will always remain the same.
If you would prefer to link to the state version of the text, notice the link at the bottom of the summary tab and the documents tab on the bill detail page. The summary page also contains the AI-generated summary of the bill.
Note that the bill page has tabs across the top with more information such as the actual bill text, actions, votes and so on. There is also a 'Similar' tab. Clicking that will get you an AI-generated list of similar bills, in order of relevance. The documents tab has links back to the state legislature website for the bill page, and for each version of the bill text, and often for other relevant information like fiscal notes.
To share a group of bills you can, of course, link to them individually. You can also go to the widget tab and grab an embeddable widget listing all of the bills on your bill sheet. Your readers will be able to click on the bills and go straight to the bill detail page to read more information. We keep the latest status of the bills updated in your widget automatically. So this is a great way to add deep content that is also completely current. More on making widgets here.
3) Create a Table of Bill Related Information
If you need to add more information to the bills, or if you just want to embed a link to the whole group instead of using a widget, you can set up a stakeholder page. That way you can decide what columns you want, add additional columns with your own comments or information, and then just share the whole group with one link (example). If you have chosen columns with information that changes over time, like the latest action, that information will stay updated automatically. If you set up your search using keywords we will also add and remove bills to your stakeholder page automatically. If you would prefer to keep the list of bills static, no problem, just archive your bill sheet to stop our automatic updates. Note: this only keeps us from adding and removing bills automatically, the daily bill information, like latest action, will still be kept current.
You can also simply dump your bill sheet out to Excel or a .csv file for other spreadsheet applications. Use the disk icon underneath the bill sheet to export.
4) Create Embeddable Static or Interactive Maps
If you have a large number of bills to share, or if you are trying to make a point about where specific topics are hot, you can share a map of legislation. If you just want to create a quick heat map of where bills have been introduced, our static map creator is super simple to use - the button is below each bill sheet. You can do your own searches and then grab the image itself or use our links for sharing or embedding.
If you would like an interactive map that readers can click on to get additional information, then you want our map widget. First, create a bill sheet with the bills you would like to share. If you add your own comments or other information to the bill sheet you will have the option of including that custom information in your map. Once you have the bills you want to share go to the widget tab on the bill sheet, and then choose the map option from the widget dropdown.
Once you switch to the map widget you’ll see you have lots of options for customizing it. See this post for more information. And here is an example map from our customer Vote.org.
If you need a regional map that can usually be done for you fairly quickly but may incur a fee. Contact us to discuss.
5) Research a specific Legislator
You will notice on any bill detail page that the legislators listed as sponsors of a bill are links; you can click on their name and get to our legislator detail pages. These pages contain a wealth of information, including basic contact info, links to relevant external sites, as well as tabs full of various relevant information which is kept up to date daily. If you would like to search for a specific legislator you can do that from the quick search box on the side navigation bar. Read more about legislator pages here.
6) Share How Legislators Voted on a Specific Topic
If you would like to summarize how all the legislators in a state (or Congress) voted on a specific bill or group of bills, you will want to try our scorecard. We will add together all of the votes legislators made, according to your weighting into an interactive analysis tool you can share with a link or embed into a web page. We even build a custom scorecard page for every legislator showing how they voted on your specific bill. See this post to learn how to create your own scorecard.
7) Invite Collaborators to Help
If you would like to share your bill sheet, stakeholder page, or scorecard with someone, no problem. Just add them to your account by choosing Manage Users from the account menu in the top corner:
Then click Add button:
When you add a user, you can also edit their sharing permissions to anything you create and vice versa. The default for the system is that the creation stays private unless actively shared.
As noted above, you can also simply export a bill sheet out to excel and send it to someone for comment.
8) Keep an Eye on the BillTrack50 Trending Bills for Inspiration
If you need ideas for things to write about, we keep a trending bills widget on our home page. Finally, if you are interested in ideas for how to feature bills, we have this post of examples from our customers.