It’s that time of year again. Sessions are coming. Time to start thinking about bills again. We have a few tips for getting your BillTrack50 account cleaned up and ready for the new year. There are also several new features we added over the summer you should check out.
If you have specific questions or would like to go through this list together (and maybe dust off your BillTrack50 skills) join on of our getting ready webinars (multiple sessions from Nov 2 through Dec 18), contact us, or simply grab a time on Karen’s calendar. If you just need a small refresher on how BillTrack50 works you can review our getting started post or check out one of our videos.
OK, on to the checklist of items to help you get your account ready for 2018.
Review Users
Please review your users periodically to make sure everyone on your user list is still appropriate, and that you haven’t forgotten to add someone. Remember all subscriptions come with unlimited users, so you don’t have to be too stingy on handing out accounts. But you should make sure from time to time that you remain comfortable with who you’ve given access to.
Access the Manage Users screen from the red account menu button in the top corner of the screen:
Note: only the Company Administrator will have the Manage Users option in their account menu. If you don’t have that option but need it, either contact the Company Administrator or contact us.
You can also see which users have logged in and which haven’t. If someone hasn’t been able to get in yet, you can send them the invitation email again. Simply click on the edit link next to their name, and then you’ll see a “send invitation email” button on the next screen. That button only shows up for people who haven’t clicked the invitation link yet. If you are having trouble with the invitation for any reason, you can also have the user simply register for BillTrack50 using our standard registration form (using the same email you used when you set them up) and they will automatically be hooked up to your account the first time they log in.
Archive Bill Sheets for Posterity
Archiving a sheet means bills will no longer be added or removed from the sheet automatically; BillTrack50 will still continue to update the status information. Archiving a sheet also removes it from your Change Alerts dashboard, and drops it to the bottom of your list of bill sheets on the Bill Sheets tab, getting it out of the way. You might want to do this for a sheet that you created for a special project, or for a bill sheet you used to create a widget, map, or stakeholder page in a blog post, or for anything other lists of bills you would like to remain static and also out of the way.
More importantly for end of the year considerations, you need to know that on January 1 all bills from sessions that are no longer relevant get dropped out of your bill sheet. Sessions that are no longer relevant include states with one year sessions including states that meet every other year and special sessions that are over and were contained within a single calendar year. For states with two-year sessions, bills are not dropped between the two years. So for example, California has a 2017-2018 regular session, so California bills will not be dropped on Jan 1, 2018. Colorado has one year sessions, so 2017 bills will be dropped on Jan 1, 2018. Texas meets odd years, so 2017 bills will be dropped on Jan 1, 2018 and no Texas results will come back for searches limited to just 2018. NJ is a special case, with their 2016-2017 session running into January, so NJ bills get dropped from 2018 bill sheets later; 2016 – 2017 bills will be dropped on Jan 13th. 2018.
If you are maintaining a list of key bills, or if you have spent a lot of time curating your list, or if you have entered a lot of additional information into your bill sheet, you may want to save a copy of your bill sheet for future review. Otherwise, that work will be lost when the new year starts. Archiving sheets at the end of the year is also a good way to build up a library of issues you’ve tracked over the years, to mine for trends or to share with others.
If you are archiving a sheet to freeze it and/or get it out of the way, you can skip the copy step in the following instructions. If you are saving a snapshot of a sheet you would like to keep using then make a copy first and archive the copy, especially if you have widgets, maps, or stakeholder pages associated with that bill sheet.
1. Open the bill sheet you want to archive. Go to the manage tab. Make a copy of your sheet using the copy button at the bottom of the page.
2. Give the copy a new name, probably you want to include the year as part of the name. Step by step instructions here.
3. Confirm you have the copy open by checking the name of your sheet and go the bottom of the manage tab. Slide on the archive setting (seen above), and agree to the confirmation message telling you that archiving is permanent (you’ll need to contact us if you ever change your mind and want to unarchive a sheet). IMPORTANT you now need to click the save button for the archive change to take effect, saying ok to the warning isn’t enough.
4. You can double check everything worked by going to your bill sheet tab and making sure the copy is at the bottom of the list and has a checkmark in the archive column. You might need to refresh your screen to see the changes if you’ve gone back to an old screen.
Remove Out of Session Bills from your Key Legislation Bill Sheets
If you have a bill sheet that is mostly or entirely bills you’ve added by bill number (by typing in bill numbers, using the plus/list button, or using the Track This Bill button), it will need to be cleaned up. When you add a bill by bill number we assume you really do want that bill and include it on your bill sheet no matter what the other query items say. Which means these bills won’t be dropped automatically when their sessions are over. If you are using the bill sheet to drive a widget or a map on your website, you might want to remove Out Of Session Bills (OOSB)s. Otherwise, your readers might get confused about why they are looking at bills from sessions that are over. Since you don’t want to have to pick through and figure out which bills are current and which aren’t, we created a quick way for you to eliminate the OOSBs. If you try this now you’ll be removing bills that weren’t valid in 2017. If you try it on Jan 1, 2018, you’ll be removing bills that aren’t valid in 2018. So you might want to remember to come back to your sheet and do this again at the beginning of the year.
To use the new tool open your bill sheet, go to the query tab, and scroll to the bottom where the bills are listed by bill number. Below the box of bill numbers, you’ll see a link to remove the OOSBs. If you hover over the link we will highlight for you which bills are about to be eliminated. Then clicking the link removes them. Note you still have to click the save button for the changes to actually go into effect.
Double Check Widget and Stakeholder Page Connections
It is a good idea to periodically check that your widgets, maps, and stakeholder pages are still hooked up and working. If you accidentally delete the bill sheet that your sharing tools are attached to, they will stop working. If you archived sheets as described above, it is also a good idea to double check in January that your widgets, maps, and stakeholder are showing new data. If you followed the steps and archived the copy of the bill sheet, everything will be fine. If you have archived the bill sheet the widget, map, or stakeholder page was based on, you won’t see new bills coming through.
If something has gone wrong you may want to simply grab the code from the widget tab or stakeholder page again, and paste it back into your web page. If that isn’t possible, or if that doesn’t fix the issue, don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll help you get sorted out.
If you’d like some inspiration for new widgets, maps, or scorecards see this post, which we update from time to time with new examples.
Review Your Bill Sheet Queries and Alert Settings
While you are stepping through your bill sheets deciding if there are any you should save (copy and archive as described above), or archive, or simply delete, you should also take this opportunity to glance at your queries and make sure they still look good to you. You might notice a few words you’d like to remove, or have become aware of some words to add. Or maybe you were getting too many bills (or not enough); this is a good time to tweak your search so you are in good shape for next year. If you’d like a consultation, feel free to grab a time on the calendar whenever you need to.
You should also look at your alert settings for each one of your bill sheets to make sure you didn’t miss turning them on, or that the settings aren’t what you thought they were. You can also think about the emails you were getting and decide to increase or decrease the number of alerts you have chosen. And don’t overlook the event schedule.
Review Regulation Date Settings
Because regulations don’t come in nice tidy sessions, regulation sheets include a date range option to give you a way to limit the time span you are searching. If you read your regulations regularly and remove ones you don’t need, that’s great, the date range won’t matter to you. Otherwise, you might want to review your regulation sheet queries and change the date range you are searching.
Review New Features
Before the year starts is also a great time to become familiar with the new features that were released over the summer.
First, as you probably noticed when reviewing your queries, we’ve added a date range option to the query tab. Here’s a post describing the ins and outs of that new feature, as well as explaining in excruciating detail how each state’s sessions behave. We also added some new data columns for you to choose from for your templates, and here’s some specific information about how you might want to use the keyword column to refine your search. If you haven’t really become familiar with templates yet, and the new column management tools, well, we think you’ll really like them — more details here. The last major bill sheet item is the new list button, which replaced the old + button. We think it is a big improvement.
We have spent a lot of time getting our regulations sheets up to snuff as well. Over the course of the year we added in most of the same functionality that bill sheets have, like templates and a list button, as well as adding new data to the screen and new states to our coverage (most recently MA). For a complete rundown see this comprehensive post about the recent regulation sheet improvements.
On the bill detail page, when you are reviewing a bill, we added a link the source document right on the summary tab, and for several states we’ve added more data to the associated documents tab. On the legislator page, when you are reviewing a legislator, we added Ballotpedia and Follow the Money links below the picture so you can get more information, like who a legislator’s donors are. We also added the email and phone numbers in for legislative staff on the Staff tab.
Finally, the scorecards have seen many improvements as well, including adding a way to score sponsorship in addition to votes, letting you sort the summary tab by any column (to help you decide which column to use, see this explanation of the different score types), and being able to add bills from multiple bill sheets to the same scorecard. Most of these options are accessed on the manage tab. See this post for a complete rundown.
We count on your suggestions to guide our development, so keep the suggestions coming.
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.