You can share your key bills and supporting information with your members via our free app, allowing your members to get bill alerts right on their phones (if they wish).
If you already have a stakeholder page created with the bills you want to share all you need to do is turn on this new feature, so skip down to “Turn on Mobile Sharing”. Otherwise, here are instructions for setting up a stakeholder page to share.
Choose Bills to Share
The first step is to choose the bills you would like to share. Like our other tools, a specific mobile stakeholder page is based on one specific bill sheet. If you already have a priority bill sheet or have a widget, map, or stakeholder page shared on your site, you’ll probably want to use the same bill sheet for your mobile stakeholder page. If not, you can create a new bill sheet and populate it with search terms or by cherry-picking bills from your existing bill sheets. If you need help with this, see this guide to creating a new bill sheet or grab an appointment for help.
Add Your Custom Information
Once you have created your bill sheet, or chosen a bill sheet to use, you can add your own custom information, like if you support or oppose the bill, a summary of how the bill will impact your organization or even a call to action. Check out this this guide to adding custom columns. To add data to one of your new columns, open the bill sheet you want to edit and double click in the cell you want to fill in to pop up a data entry screen (check out this video for more).
Create a Stakeholder Page
Mobile stakeholder pages are created from “normal” stakeholder pages. Creating a stakeholder page for sharing gives you an opportunity to choose which columns you would like to share. You can add your own custom information (see above) or you can take out columns you think your members shouldn’t see or wouldn’t be interested in. Simply create a new template with the columns that are appropriate to share, then go to the Stakeholder Pages tab and create a stakeholder page using your new template and the bill sheet with the bills you want to share. If you already have an appropriate stakeholder page set up, then you don’t need to create a new one, you can simply enable mobile sharing on that existing page (see below). Check out this guide to creating stakeholder pages.
Turn on Mobile Sharing
On the relevant stakeholder page Manage tab you’ll see a checkbox called “Share this stakeholder page with the mobile app”. Checking that box will give you the 6 letter code you need to share with your members along with the link to download the free iOS BillTrack50 app from the app store or for Android from Google Play. You can share this code however you wish, publicly or privately, that is up to you. The app is free to users.
Create a QR Code for your new Mobile Stakeholder Page (optional)
Creating a QR code to share for your new mobile stakeholder page is easy:
1) open a QR code generator like this one
2) make sure you've selected Plain Text not a URL
2) type in “product code | description" — for example: EWOJVEB | Artificial Intelligence Legislation
3) click download
You can share the code in a blog post, newsletter, email, on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, really wherever you like. Your members can scan the code right from a computer screen or from paper, either way.
Try Out the Page for Yourself
Feel free to grab the app for yourself, then:
- Go to Tracked Bills
- Click Edit in the top right corner
- Click the green + icon
- Enter your bill list code. Or try the code EWOJVEB to follow Artificial Intelligence legislation or WNWCGK to see Minimum Wage bills
Or to try out the QR code:
- On the Home screen, go to Scan QR Code
- Scan the QR Code below for our Census sheet
You can always go back into your account and remove these pages later. (Note: If you have already logged in to your BillTrack50 account on the app you’ll want to log out to see what your members will see).
To see the mobile stakeholder page and its bills go back to the main menu and tap the “Tracked Bills” option. You will see your mobile stakeholder pages in the "Stakeholder Pages Shared With Me" section.
Click a stakeholder page to see basic information:
Then click Bills to see the full stakeholder page.
At the top there are options for sorting the page by state, progress stage, most recent changes and date.
Click a bill to see basic information, and you can then click through to see the details of the bill of its votes.
Also notice that from the home screen of the app you can go to settings and control what notifications the app will send. The alerts to the app are just like the email alerts, they go out once a day, in the morning.
What Your Members Need to Do
Your members will need to download the app and enter the product code or scan the QR code you shared with them. You can also share this guide to using the app.