How to Find Bills You Want to Track

How to Monitor Bills

How to Add Relevant Information to Your Issues 

How to Find Bills You Want to Track

Discovery Alerts

• This is where all newly introduced bills that hit your issue areas will be
• Any bill in inbox is reviewed the day it is received
  • 1. If relevant, add to the corresponding Issue(s)
    • Bills can be placed into multiple Issues
  • 2. If irrelevant, mark as irrelevant
• Add any bills you’ve identified as pertinent to an Issue. The bill will be saved under the Data tab in an Issue Folder

How to Monitor Bills 

Issues > Overview / Details Tabs

• The Overview tab on the Issues Page allows you and your team to identify the main pain points around the issue at hand

 Issues > Data Tab

• Any bills in an Issue can be further organized in 3 different ways
  • 1. Add a Priority to the bill (High, Medium, Low)
  • 2. Add a Position to the bill (Support, Monitor, Oppose)
  • 3. Add a Label to the bill
    • Labels can be anything from subtopics/ subcategories, risk categories of the bill, or business units affected by the bill
      • Examples:
        • “2019 Strategy”
        • “Resale Policy”
        • “Risk Category: Tax”
        • “Finance Department”

How to Add Relevant Information to Issues

Issues > Files / Links Tabs

• Files: Any relevant talking points, analyses, one pagers, proposed amendments/prefiles that you have access to should be uploaded to FiscalNote
  • If the file is in relation to a particular bill, legislator, or stakeholder, link the entity to the article
  • Then, link to the corresponding Issue(s)
• Links: Any relevant news links or press releases should be loaded into FiscalNote
  • If the article speaks about a particular bill, legislator, or stakeholder, link the entity to the article
  • Then, link to the corresponding Issue(s) for easy organization going forward
  • If you have access to Congressional Quarterly (CQ), you may add to your FiscalNote account any links to news stories, reports, or other content from CQ.  

Issues > Actions Tab and Actions

• This is FiscalNote’s CRM capability
• This is where you can track activities with your stakeholders so that you can gain insight how you and your team tracking towards your goals
• Any meeting with a legislative agency employee,  lobbyist or trade association representative should be logged in FiscalNote with the following information:
  • Meeting time and date
  • FiscalNote user attendees
  • External attendees
  • Link to a bill, legislator, committee, stakeholder when appropriate
  • Link to the corresponding Issue(s)
  • Meeting notes should be detailed
    • What was discussed? Summary
    • Are there next steps? Next Steps

Issues > Stakeholders and Contacts

• This is your personal rolodex outside of state legislators
• We recommend adding any contacts with whom you frequently interact
• From here, you can track your Actions with them to measure the success you are making towards achieving your impact
• Any relevant stakeholders (legislators ,committees, external contacts) on a given issue should be added. A stakeholder is considered any person or group who is influential on a given issue
  • Stakeholders can be added to multiple issues