You are an organization with national membership, and have a website that includes a page for each state (or region) for their specific issues. You are tracking bills across the country in one bill sheet, but want 50 different widgets, each highlighting important bills in just one specific state. Luckily we had you in mind when we created the state filter for our widget!
Let’s take a look at how one organization, Politics Beauty, made this feature work for them. They are a national organization that, among other things, keeps members updated about legislation and issues impacting licensed beauty professionals. As you can see on their website, you can click on any state name and see a widget with just the bills for that state. We keep the widgets updated for you, so your members can always see the latest bill information. According to Tamara Johnson, Senior Advocate for Politics Beauty: “There was no way that we could keep up with each bill and keep Licensed Beauty Professionals informed without BillTrack50.”
The real time saving feature is that you can keep all your bills in one bill sheet, but still have your widget(s) show a specific state (or group of states). Politics Beauty, for example, finds it much easier to keep all their bills in one bill sheet than to separate them out by state. Keeping everything in one bill sheet helps them stay organized when reviewing bills and also keeps their alerts neat and tidy. As new bills are introduced they get an alert, review the new bills, eliminate the bills that aren’t relevant, and then the new bills automatically show up on the appropriate widget.
See this blog post for a guide to creating a widget. Once you have your widget, notice the line that says state filter:
You can copy your widget script on to each of your web pages, and change the state filter line to match what you need. You don’t need to recreate the widget script over and over, you can simply edit the state filter line directly to say, for example, ‘CO’, to show just a single state, or perhaps ‘CA, OR, WA’, if you would like to do a region. Notice the list of state should have single quotes around it, and end in a comma.
As always, contact us if you have any questions or need any help.
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.