How to Manage Stakeholders in New FiscalNote

Learn how your team can centralize your combined stakeholder networks for a more seamless collaboration.

 

IN THIS ARTICLE

1. How to use the Stakeholders tab

2. How to search for a Stakeholder

3. How to organize Stakeholders

4. How to upload contacts to your network and fix upload errors

5. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

 

1. How to use the Stakeholders tab

 

The Stakeholders tab is divided into two categories:

• Officials/Governing Bodies - where government elected officials, employees, and staffers from different states or countries can be found
• Your Contacts - where all your nongovernment contacts like board of directors, subject matter experts (SMEs), reporters, et al. can be found or are added.

 

2. How to search for a stakeholder

On the Search Bar dropdown, select Stakeholders.

 

 

Type in the name of the stakeholder or input keywords if you cannot remember the full name.

 

 

You can sort the result by Relevancy or Descending/Ascending order.

 

 

You can also filter your search by the following:

 

 

 

a. Stakeholder Type

• Legislative: All Legislators, Committees, Council of the EU, Members of the EU Parliament, Representatives, Senators
• Executive: All Government Executives, Attorneys General, Comptrollers, Directors, EU Commission, Governors, Lt. Governors, Secretaries, Treasurers
• Uploaded Contacts: Uploaded Organizations, Uploaded People
• Locals: Local Officials

 

b. Locations

• North America
• United States
• Canada
• Europe

 

c. Office/Agency

 

d. Party

• Republican
• Democrat
• Other
• Independent
• Libertarian
• Green

e. Chamber

• House
• Senate
• Chamber of Deputies
• House of Commons
• House of Representatives
• Senate
• Senado Federal
• Senate of Canada
• U.S. House of Representatives
• U.S. Senate
• Assembly
• House of Delegates
• General Assembly

You can also Issues and Labels filters to easily access contacts that have already been added to issues or if labels have been added to identify a stakeholders specific area of interest.

 

3. How to organize stakeholders

Organizing relevant information about legislators or important contacts help you and your team to be more efficient and effective in achieving policy outcomes.

 

When you navigate to a legislator's page, you can:

• add them to the Issues they impact

 

• apply labels to indicate sub-topics

 

 

• add notes/actions for every engagement

 

 

 

4. How to add contacts to your network

 

Stakeholders are not limited to legislators or government officials. If you need to add an important contact to your network, you can do so through the Create Contact button or the Upload Contacts button.

 

 

The Create Contact button allows you to upload individual persons or organizations and fill in their contact information, affiliations, and related contents.

 

 

For bulk actions, you can utilize the Upload Contacts button and use this template: fiscalnote_sample_contacts.csv

 

Note: The Upload Contacts only works for people, not organizations.

 

Fixing Upload Errors

 

a. An error occurred - Malformed CSV: Invalid byte sequence in UTF-8 in line 2.. - This could refer to special characters used on the form. Please remove any special characters such as à, é, î, œ, ü, ñ and the like as the platform doesn't support this yet. Once removed, you should be able to upload the files without any issues.

 

b. First Name* is required in the 86 row / 1 column and so on.. - This means that you have left required rows and columns blank. If you have already listed all the people to be included, please remove empty row and save the file as .csv. That should fix the issue. Another fix for this, is simply copying the Header line of the CSV template provided by FiscalNote and replacing your file with that header. Don't forget to hit save, then upload the file again. This shouldn't cause any issue or error.

 

 

5. Frequently Asked Questions

 

Q: I noticed that the Stakeholder information is not updated. When will you update it?

A: We try our best to keep all stakeholders information up to date and we would appreciate if you can help us do this. You can email us at support@fiscalnote.com with the subject line: Update Stakeholder Data and include the in following details on your email body:

 

• Stakeholder name
• Position

 

Q: I would like for staffers of a certain Stakeholder or organization be added to FiscalNote. How do I do that?

A: You can add the contacts as described on section 4 of this article or you can email us at support@fiscalnote.com with the subject line: Add Stakeholder Data and include the in following details on your email body:

• Organization List
• Web Page Reference

 

Q: I am encountering another error when uploading contacts. What do I do?

A: Please pay attention to the error message and review your file if it talks about a certain line or required column. You may also share a screenshot or screen recording of the error you are encountering and send it to support@fiscalnote.com so we can help you find out the root cause and provide solutions.

 

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.