We are pleased to announce our last big improvement from the summer months: bill hearing schedules. You can now see if any of your important bills have a hearing coming up in one convenient place, our new Event Schedule tab. (Note: the Event Schedule tab will only appear if you have set up events to track. See following explanation.)
You assign bills to see in your event schedule at the bill sheet level. That way you can follow your key topics, without having your schedule cluttered up by lower priority items. To add a bill sheet to your event schedule, simply go to your bill sheet and click on the alerts tab. You’ll see a new section that looks like this:
Tick the box and save your changes, and that’s it; you’ll see when the bills on this bill sheet are scheduled for a hearing. If you would like to get an email when a bill is scheduled, that is still handled by action alerts, so make sure you have action alerts turned on. This new event schedule alert type is just to indicate you would like to see the bills on the new Event Schedule display.
Once you have some bill sheets added to the event schedule you will see a new tab on your home dashboard, called the Event Schedule tab.
This tab contains a grid with all the bills coming up for hearing in the next two weeks. We have included the bill sheet name in the grid to remind you why you are interested in this bill. You can click on any column to sort by that column, and you can use the filter button to filter data, such as looking at just one state, or just one bill sheet, or even search for a specific bill. Like with a bill sheet, you can also export this grid to Excel so you can easily share it with other people. Or, if you have shared bill sheets with other users, they can create their own event schedule by going to the alerts tab and adding what they need.
We currently only support some states with this feature; see the list below (as of 9/22/2015). We will be adding more states over the coming months. Please let us know if you have particular requests.
| State Code | Event Count |
| AL | 2116 |
| AZ | 2044 |
| CA | 10069 |
| CO | 2338 |
| FL | 2455 |
| IL | 4421 |
| MD | 10261 |
| ME | 3341 |
| MO | 3424 |
| MT | 2456 |
| ND | 2019 |
| NH | 3215 |
| NJ | 2890 |
| NY | 9823 |
| OH | 541 |
| OK | 1759 |
| PA | 634 |
| TX | 5131 |
| VT | 2124 |
| WA | 5328 |
About BillTrack50 – BillTrack50 is a user friendly free service that provides legislation research in all 50 states and federally. BillTrack50 also offers legislation and regulation tracking across the nation with tools to help organization stay on top of changes (bill sheets and alerts) and share legislation they are tracking with key stakeholders (legislator scorecards, widgets and stakeholder pages). If you are interested in learning more about how BillTrack50 saves organizations time and money, sign up for a demo and try it out BillTrack50 Pro for a month, for free.