New Home Page Bling for the New Session
As you are likely well aware, the sessions have started (or at least are pre-filing) nearly everywhere. We are processing about 3,000 new bills a day. To help you see the sessions unfold we’ve made a couple changes to our home page. First, we have a running count of 2013 bills introduced front and center, and a link to a map showing the count for each state for 2013 (if you pull it up from the home page you can hover over states to get the current counts; we update the map every evening).
We’ve also added a trending bills widget to our home page so you can see the bills the most people have clicked on our site over the last seven days.
In addition to the new quick instructional video we released a couple of weeks ago to help people get started searching for bills for free, we have added a tour of our subscription tools which gives a longer overview of our paid features.
New Features
Inside the site we’ve added an option to search by passed (on bill sheets) and now display that information on bill sheets and on the bill detail pages.
Finally there are several improvements to our stakeholder pages, to make the new public stakeholder functionality even more friendly. We’ve removed the newsletter and sign in links from the top, to keep from confusing your readers. We’ve also given you the ability hide (and add back) any threads or comments that you need to. And the stakeholder page now acts more like the bill sheet, expanding a row to allow you to read all the text in it when you click on it.
Examples from Customers
Speaking of stakeholder pages, our customers have come up with some nice ideas for how to use the stakeholder pages and widgets to share information. You can see an example of a widget on our home page, but another nice example is how The Rio Grande Foundation implemented their widgets with dynamic sizing, to make them very mobile friendly.
I also like how The City of Missoula added a stakeholder page using a frame on their site, sharing with citizens their position on bills, and inviting them to click through and read the full bill text if they are so inclined.
One last example is the Colorado Republican Business Coalition who has added a widget to their page for a quick look at bills, and also a link to their full stakeholder page for their members who would like to see more information. This is also a nice example of using the privacy settings cleverly, their legislative committee to use discussion threads, but the public can only see the basic information about their position on the various bills.
I also recently made a page of legislation about social media, which I find to be pretty interesting. And one about medical marijuana by popular demand. And one about fracking, because it interests me. Perhaps you’ll find them interesting too.
Good luck this session! I hope you find some of our tools useful, or at least fun.
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.