Written by: Karen Suhaka | April 9, 2020

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 our getting started post 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 video on 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). For a general overview of stakeholder pages, check out this video.

Turn on Mobile Sharing

The company administrator can add mobile stakeholder pages to your subscription from the Manage Account option in their dropdown menu.  Adding mobile stakeholder pages to an account is $400/year and will be prorated to match your current expiration date.

Once you have mobile stakeholder pages on your account, you’ll see a checkbox available “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 completely free to users, with no in-app charges or other shenanigans.

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) type in “{product code}|{description} — in my example above QUMZSJ|Census2020, another example below
3) right click on qr code to save the image
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, go to Account Management, choose product codes, and enter your product code. Or try the code QUMZSJ to follow Census 2020 bills or code WNWCGK to see Minimum Wage bills (which will send alerts nearly every day, once a day). Or to try out the QR code go to Account, then Product Codes, choose scan, then scan the Minimum Wage QR code from above or below is the Census 2020 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 “Stakeholder Pages” option. If you are logged in it will say Bill Sheets/Stakeholder pages and you’ll need to scroll to the bottom, after all of your own bill sheets, to see the mobile stakeholder pages. Once you have clicked into a mobile stakeholder page notice you can click in the search bar to bring up various options, including grouping bills by their progress, what changes the bill had recently (if any), or even group by your custom information like your position on the bills.

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 post to explain how to use the app.