As usual, we have been busy making changes all year to improve our data and database to make your experience more reliable, intuitive, and hopefully even enjoyable. We have improved our website to make tracking and sharing legislation as painless as possible. We have also expanded our help features, including a youtube help list of short videos along with longer webinars to give you more information about our various features and how best to use them.
If you ever need any inspiration for how to use our tools, check out this post with a variety of good live examples from some of our customers. If you missed our new features roundup from last year, please read this post. And now on to our new feature list:
Backend Improvements
Our biggest project this year was to implement a new search engine technology for generating our search results. The new tool gives us more processing speed (11 x faster than before), and more importantly, greater flexibility. You would have particularly noticed the improvements if you search for bills by code section (like 125.6.7 or 134-19). We were also able to increase the query character limit to 500 characters. The new search engine also helps us in several ways behind the scenes, allowing us to send alerts earlier in the morning and have other daily updates available on the website earlier in the day too, as well as helping us make our search term highlight tool much smarter.
We’ve also continued to improve our data coverage and parsers. Thank you to everyone who has sent in issues and ideas and requests over the year. In addition to generally improving the bill text results, especially around underline and strikethrough in certain states, we’ve also put in place a new warning system so that we can flag bills to alert you in certain cases that you might want to review the official document. We are aiming for perfection, but while we are still working to get there we want to be as transparent as possible to help you always have the right information.
Small Website Updates
You may or may not have noticed the various small improvement that rolled out during the year.
- We made some changes to how we account for political parties, which improved the Vote Detail display as well as the Scorecard displays.
- We added a calendar link to our contact us page to make it easier to request a meeting any time you need to talk to us.
- We improved exporting functionality across the board and improved our pdf bill sheet report based on customer feedback.
- We added a copy button for regulation sheets as well as other changes to make them more like bill sheets.
- You can now color code your map widget by position, just like the bill list widget.
- And finally, we’ve been working on making our bill progress graphic more understandable, and hope to have those improvements in place by the end of the year.
New iOS App Releases
We have made many changes to our free app over the last year. The original version was designed to help citizens look up their representatives, view upcoming elections, search for bills and save the bills to a watch list. Subsequent versions released during the year added the ability for BillTrack50 subscribers to view their own bill sheets, as well as group bill by their own custom columns and color bills by position.
Stay tuned for our next release which will allow organizations to share bills with their members via the app, as well as support for alerts. This new product will be called Mobile Stakeholder Pages and should be ready for you to use by the beginning of the new sessions.
API Extensions
To support the app as well as various customer requests, we have added quite a bit of functionality to our API. You can get more information about votes and vote totals, “official” document links, as well as other odds and ends. For more information consult our API documentation. We also redesigned how we manage our API call limits so if you need to raise your daily limit contact us to discuss. Finally, importantly, we’ve decommissioned the API 1.0 and requested all users move to our API 2.0.
Third Party Scorecard
One of the prettiest announcements we made this year was about a new WordPress plugin legislative scorecard created using our API and sold by Revive Design Studios. This feature uses one of our popular features, our legislative scorecard, which enables organizations to score bills going through the legislative process. If you use WordPress, you may want to consider integrating the separate Legislative Scorecard WordPress Plugin, to get the following features:
- Find Your Legislator by Address
- Click-to-email or click-to-call legislators directly from your website
- Auto-updates from your Bill Track 50 scorecard
- Auto-populates official legislator headshots
- Ability to customize colors to match your website
- Ability to customize the banner image
- Members-only feature to encourage memberships with your organization (optional)
WordPress plugin in-use
Additional Support Resources
Youtube Help List
Our youtube playlist has many different, helpful how-tos for first time users or people who need a little refresh after taking a well deserved break from BillTrack50 during the offseason. Check out these short videos to set up alerts and hearings schedules, get a the lowdown on legislator scorecards, adn some advice on setting up stakeholder pages. If you are implementing widgets, decide between a map or list widget and don’t forget to color code them! Also, ensure you know how to manage users and templates to make everything as simple as possible for everyone in your organization.
On-Demand Webinars
We hosted a webinar this year taking a dive into how to set up scorecards with many different levels of customization and personalization. Here is a step by step blog with a short how-to, our webinar is more in depth. See some great examples from customers, the general setup, different details to add understanding to your card. We also talk about ways to address absent or abstaining votes or out of office legislators. Go to this blog with an outline of the talk along with the video.
When thinking about getting started with your account, how to best write queries can be quite daunting. However, as long as you can think of at least one way to describe your area of interest, we have some tips to help you explore legislation and quickly build up a solid list of keywords. Check out these tips here.
Upcoming Webinars
We have two webinar series you can register for right now. The first is a new user getting started session offered every other Wednesday. You can sign up for a session at any time using this link. We are also conducting a webinar to help you get your account ready for the new 2019 sessions; it will be offered at various times between now and the end of the year, with new sessions potentially added by demand. View the current schedule and/or sign up for a session of this webinar here.
Thank You for a Great Year!
We grow and improve based on your feedback. This year was our best year yet and we’re really looking forward to all of your ideas and suggestions in 2019. Thank you for your support and good luck with the new sessions.