Issues Management: Workflow Best Practices

1. Preparation
2. Putting the Plan into Action
3. Accounting for Changes
4. Seeing the Results

Preparation

At the start of a new legislative session, take stock of activities performed last session for all members on your team.  Who was involved?  What were their responsibilities?  Were they successful?  Where is there room for improvement?  Use this information to your advantage when planning for the next session.  We recommend always doing the following when preparing an Issues Management strategy:

1. Document Goals: What is your end objective?  Keep this top of mind when framing your goals.
2. Take Stock of Your Resources: What do you have at your disposal to achieve said goals?  This includes, but is not limited to: news & software subscriptions, employees, & stakeholders.
3. Strategize: How will you use the resources at your disposal to your advantage?  Assign responsibilities to team members and share how you will leverage external resources.
4. Inform & Seek Feedback: Share your strategy.  Upload an Issues & Labels strategy to Issues folders.  Update Issue Overview sections with new, key details.  Download an Issue brief to debrief stakeholders on your plan of action and seek their feedback before getting started.

• Click here to learn more about using Issues and Labels together.

Putting the Plan into Action

After sharing your Issues Management strategy, enforce it. Even the most well-structured success strategies will fail if they aren't acted upon. 

We understand not all organizations have the capacity to do so, but if you're fortunate enough with time, we recommend holding a weekly meeting with FiscalNote users. The most successful teams using FiscalNote hold a weekly team roundtable where members share key updates, such as:

• High priority bills or regulations picked up over the past week
• Progression or movement updates on bills of interest
• Key updates from stakeholder engagement
• New Issues or sub-topics to monitor
• Critical news updates
• New resources uncovered

For legislative trackers, we recommend creating standing Reports to monitor your assignments.  Standing Reports, or refreshable reports, do not have to be recreated.  Use 'Select All' in the bill queue during the creation process, and click refresh to see the new bills that have been added to the Issue(s) since the report was last run:

• Click here to learn more about Reports

For lobbyists and Government Affairs specialists who meet with stakeholders, we recommend using the Actions Center to keep track of your progress.  The team's efforts will show changes at the top of the screen, from: Overall (total), Monthly & Weekly totals:

To review your own efforts, use the Creator filter on the left panel and select your name:

We recommend producing an Export each week or month that activity occurs. Add the date in the title:

Whenever a stakeholder or colleague asks for an update, you'll have numerous versions at-the-ready.

Accounting for Changes

Most organizations using FiscalNote experience a shift mid-session in one of the following: objectives, Issues, sub-topics, or stakeholder relationships. FiscalNote makes it easy to account for changes on-the-fly. Create a new Issue when new topics to monitor arise. Apply a new label when new sub-topics appear. Add stakeholders when new contacts are developed. However, we also recommend a few best practices when doing so:

When adding a new Issue: review who needs access. To speed up collaboration, ask all members with access to upload relevant resources to Files & Links, and add important contacts to Stakeholders

• Click here to learn more about granting access to Issues

When implementing a new sub-topic to monitor: The team lead should review current labels in-use via Labels under Organization Settings.  Ensure the label is not already in-use.  

As a best practice, we recommend revisiting the Labels page weekly.  Clean up any user-errors such as misspellings by merging labels:

• Click here to learn more about using Issues and Labels together

When adding new stakeholders: account for every issue they may impact. Add them to any and all that apply, granting users full insight into the key players Issue by Issue.

• Click here to learn more about Mapping Stakeholders

Seeing the Results

When implementing an Issues Management strategy to meet your objectives, the results end up taking care of themselves. Policy is neatly classified by Issue and Label. Stakeholder engagement is accurately documented with Actions. Everyone has access to the resources they need. And everyone has the ability to report out on updates in just a few clicks.  

Use an Issues Management strategy to:

• Strategize how you will define success
• Change your responsiveness from Reactive to Proactive
• Uncover new reputational risks that arise
• Find new business development opportunities in different markets or geographies
• Quickly report on top policy priorities for your organization
• Monitor changes in key geographies and legislatures you operate in
• Share takeaways from important events you’re attending, such as conferences or summits.

Note: We are constantly rolling out updates and making improvements to the platform. Please help us keep the Help Center up to date by reporting any information that may need some updating at support@fiscalnote.com.