Feeling ready to be done with 2020? So are we.
Getting your BillTrack50 ready for the new year is a great chance to review your information to make sure it is up to date, as well as get organized to make the beginning of the session(s) as painless as possible. Also, if your state has been out of session for a while and you haven’t visited BillTrack50 for a few months, you might feel a bit disoriented when you first log in — we made some major changes over the summer! We encourage you to log in before the end of the year and poke around a little to get comfortable before you are under the pressure of keeping up with new bills being introduced.
This post will cover highlights of the new site, plus the main housekeeping and rollover steps we encourage you to take between now and the end of the year. You can also view this video for a walkthrough of the most important new features to consider when getting your account organized for 2021.
If you have specific questions, would like to go through this list together, dust off your BillTrack50 skills, and tour the new features of the new BillTrack50, we’d love to have you join one of our Getting Ready for 2021 Webinars:
You can also contact us or simply grab a time on our calendar for some personal help.
There are three major topics to our 2021 checklist: Review of the new BillTrack50, Housekeeping, and Rollover.
1. Review of the new BillTrack50
We have a post running through the highlights of the new BillTrack50, which links to an in-depth explanation about the new features (more here). The items you need to know now are:
A. Your Bill Sheets Aren’t Gone! The landing page when you log-in features a change alert grid that only lists bill sheets that have bills with changes from yesterday, to make it easier to identify what topics need your attention. The full list of bill sheets is now accessed from the navigation panel on the left-hand side of the screen. (More on navigation here.)
B. The new grid has tons of new features highlighted in this video.
More about using our new bill sheet grid here.
C. Bill sheets now have an option to be current session only. If you use that option your bill sheets will automatically roll over every year. Notice the Session Years label is drop-down now, and you can choose Current Session. As long as you are noticing things, we also added Bill Type as a filter option, so you can easily remove Resolutions and Memorials if you like.
D. User management has changed in an important way you need to notice. Every user can now create their own bill sheets, but the bill sheets they make will be private just to them. That includes you — if you make a bill sheet it will not appear in everyone’s account unless you purposely share it with everyone. We think you are really going to love this new way of managing users. More on multi-user management here. Our new grouping functionality is also now available; if you have a lot of users and/or bill sheets this might be a good time to get them organized into groups. Reach out to Karen if that is of interest.
E. User management also now includes the company admin, which is useful even if you are the only user in your account. You can now choose user management from the account menu and manage yourself. On the bill sheet tab, you’ll see all the bill sheets you have access to. You can now set sheets you don’t need very often, like old archived sheets, to “none”, and they’ll be removed from your list. You can also switch sheets you don’t want to accidentally change to “view” so you can’t mess them up. You can always come back to the management screen and change settings to give yourself access to sheets again whenever you need to.
F. The scorecards have several new improvements, including being able to add comments to specific votes. The visual scorecard also has many new features, including a new multi-year version that is worth checking out. (Example, click on any legislator.)
2. Housekeeping
Review Users
We know people come and go, so we’ve worked hard to make it easy to manage users in your account. This time of year is a great time to make sure everyone on your user list should still have access, review their permissions, and make sure you haven’t forgotten to add someone. Remember all subscriptions come with unlimited users so you can be as generous as you need to be. But in return, we ask you to please review your user list at least once a year and remove inactive accounts.
Special for this year, because of the new user management features we’ve added (see sections D and E above) you’ll want to review user settings for all users. We gave any user that had Bill Sheet Administrator permission in the old system Security Administrator privileges in the new system. That might be too high a setting for some of your users. It used to be that you had to be a bill sheet administrator to add a new bill sheet, but that is no longer the case; everyone can now add bill sheets. So for users that should NOT be able to add and remove other users, or be able to change other user permissions, you should remove their Security Admin permission, and instead just give them permission to specific bill sheets. If you have a lot of bill sheets or a lot of users and setting up these permissions is going to be a big project, reach out to Karen for help, and to learn about the new BillTrack50 Enterprise Level which offers group management.
Access the manage users screen from the account menu button in the top corner of the screen to add and remove users as needed and update their permissions.
Note: only users with the Security Administrator permission level will have the Manage Users option in their account menu. If you don’t have that option but need it, either contact your Company Administrator or contact us.
If you invited someone and they haven’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” and a check box under their name on the next screen. This 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.
Capturing your hard work
You can use archiving to take a “snapshot” of a bill sheet. If you are maintaining a list of key bills, have spent a lot of time curating a bill sheet based on keywords, or have entered a lot of additional information into your bill sheet using custom columns, you may want to save a copy of your bill sheet for future review. 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, share with others, or use to create a “lifetime” scorecard to look at legislators across the years.
To take a snapshot we recommend making a copy of your current sheet and then archiving the copy. Keeping the original sheet active means you won’t need to change your widgets or stakeholder pages and your users won’t need to reestablish their alert settings. Everything will keep rolling along into the new year.
3. Rolling Over to New Year
Timeline
This year you have the option of setting your bill sheets to roll over automatically from now on. On each bill sheet, go to the query tab and then go down to the timeline; you’ll see the Session Years label is actually a dropdown and you can change it to Current Session. (See item C from the summary section at the top of this post for more info and a screenshot.)
If you use this new current session setting, you’ll want to be extra sure to remember to take snapshots after your sessions are over so you don’t forget and have your sheets roll over on you before you are ready. Of course, we don’t actually delete your data, so you can always switch from the current session to the timeline, go back to the old year(s), take your snapshot, and set the timeline back to the current session.
You are welcome to continue to use the timeline and wait to move your sheets forward when you are ready. If that’s what you prefer then notice when you create a new bill sheet it will be set to the current session by default, so you’ll want to change that to show the timeline.
Removing Old Bills
If you are using your bill sheet to drive a widget or a map on your website, you might also want to remove Out Of Session Bills. Otherwise, your readers might get confused about why they are looking at bills from sessions that are over. Of course, if you are listing historic bills for a specific reason, by all means, leave them in there.
Any bills on your bill sheet because they match your search will drop out Jan 1, assuming your bill sheet is set to “current session” (see above for more on that). Any bills you added by bill number or by using the +, though, will stay on your sheet until you remove them. Luckily removing old bill numbers is easy. Open your bill sheet, go to the Query tab, and scroll to the bottom to see the bills you have listed by bill number. You can 1) use the little x next to the bill number to remove individual bills, 2) click in the bill number box after the last bill number and then hold down the backspace key to quickly obliterate all of the bill numbers, or 3) use the Remove tool beneath the box.
Bills from 2020 sessions will not be considered out of session until Jan 1, 2021. After that date, use the Remove tool by first hovering over the Remove link to highlight in red which bills are about to be eliminated, just to make sure you are happy with what is going to happen. Then actually click on the remove link to remove them. Note: you will still have to click the save button at the bottom of the query tab for the changes to go into effect. This Remove tool is helpful to remove all the bills at once if you have many of them. It is especially nice because it will leave behind any bills from states with two-year sessions that are still relevant. It will also show you if you’ve accidentally left some bills on your sheet in years past.
If you’ve worked hard to compile your list of bills, please be sure to make a copy of the bill sheet before deleting all the bill numbers. See the snapshot section above if you haven’t yet. You can always delete the snapshot later, and better to be safe than sorry!
Regulation Sheets
You might also want to review the dates on your regulation sheets. 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 search. 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 to make sure the time period makes sense for what you are trying to do. Of course, also peek at the query and alert settings as long as you are going through them.
Annual Review
Review your query & alerts
While you are stepping through your bill sheets, 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 convenient time on our calendar. If you are happy with your 2020 bills you might also take this chance to turn on the keyword column to browse through and make sure you are familiar with all the terms currently being used in case there are a few words you should add or remove for 2021.
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.
Confirm your widgets & stakeholder pages still work
It is a good idea to periodically check that your widgets 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 and stakeholder pages are showing new data. If you followed the steps and archived a copy of the bill sheet, everything will be fine. If you have archived the bill sheet that the widget 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.
4. Extra Credit
Renew your Subscription
BillTrack50 does not automatically renew your subscription. We believe in earning your business every single year. We will reach out to you close to the end of your subscription term to talk about how it is going and what you’d like to do. However, you can renew yourself if you are so inclined. From the account menu, choose Manage Account and visit the subscription section. You can only renew within a month of your subscription expiring.
Subscribe to our Newsletter
Lots of changes came to BillTrack50 this year. Want to make sure you are in the know about exciting developments to come in 2021? Read our newsletter! Subscribe here.
Go Mobile
Check out mobile stakeholder pages to share your list of bills with others via our app.
Remember to rate and review the app in the app stores Apple App Store / Android (Google Play)
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash