Our legislator scorecards are a great way to look back at a session and see how it went for your agenda, hold legislators accountable and let them know you are watching them, and give your members an interactive tool to review their how their representatives did. See this blog post for some example scorecards from our customers.
The good news is, making a scorecard is easy! See how I do it in six minutes flat:
To recap what I show in the video there are the three steps to create your scorecard:
Prepare your list of bills
The easiest way to create a scorecard is from a bill sheet with a position column that you have already filled in. If you have a number of bill sheets and you just want to choose a few bills from each one, no problem. Just create a new bill sheet with no search terms at all (so it is empty when you make it). Then use our little list button to add bills to the new list from each of your existing bill sheets. More on how to do that here. If you don’t already have a position column on your bill sheet use the template manager to add one. You can see how that is done in the video or see directions here. Choose a position for each bill you want to rate by double-clicking in the position cell.
Now you are finished with the hard part.
Create your scorecard
From the home screen choose the scorecard tab and push the “New Scorecard” button. You’ll need to choose what state the scorecard is for (for Congress pick “United States” from the list) and then give your scorecard a name. Then pick which bill sheet you want to start from. If you leave this choice blank you will get a chance to add individual bills to your scorecard after you create it. That’s it.
Fine tune your scores
The scorecard is created using your entries in the position column to set default scores. You can choose the edit link on any bill to adjust those scores, including giving legislators extra credit (positive or negative) for sponsoring the bill and going through each vote to decide if it should be included or should have a different score. Scoring individual votes can be especially handy for federal bills where if you want to score individual amendments. You can also add your own title for the bill, comments, links, categories, and so on. For a complete walkthrough of these basics see this on demand webinar. A discussion of what each of the scores means is here.
The manage tab of the scorecard has many more options you can set including making your scorecard public. For a tour of all of these advanced features see this post and this post or schedule a demo or help session here.
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.