Report Progress - Legislative Reports with Actions

1. Introduction
2. Building Legislative Reports with Actions
3. Future Report Updates
4. Legislative Reports with Actions - 1-Pager

Introduction

Whether you are a lobbyist, work at an advocacy shop, or deal with policy in your day to day responsibilities, you may be asked to share your efforts around promoting or halting specific policy documents.  For example, if you work for an auto company, your board may ask what you and/or your team has done to help promote all favorable vehicle safety legislation this session, and what may have happened in the legislative process as a result.  Use FiscalNote's Legislative Reports to both show your efforts and the resulting bill status(es). 

Building Legislative Reports with Actions

Go to Reports from the Menu on the left and select your Issue from the Issue filter.  In this example, we are choosing 'Vehicle Safety':

Next, click 'Select All' from the list of matches to the right to add all related bills to the Report you intend to build.  In this scenario, these are all of the bills the team has added to the 'Vehicle Safety' Issue this session, for all legislatures.   If you need to report on a specific few bills, use the checkboxes next to the matches instead. *However, keep in mind that only reports that use the 'Select All' option in the bills queue allow you to refresh the report in the future to capture new bills being monitored, along with any additional work the team has performed since. 

After making your selections, click 'Create Report' on the top right.  We recommend choosing the 'Weekly Legislative Update' template provided by the FiscalNote team:

Make edits to the Report presentation by hovering over any section and clicking the pencil icon that appears.  We recommend adding a logo and customizing the title for each report, especially if this is for a specific client of yours.  You may also choose to switch the 'Bills by State' map to a Heatmap, for example.  This helps to better understand where the largest concentration of relevant bills comes from, and perhaps who you should prioritize working with as a result:

Click the green Save tab at the top of the Report builder when done making edits.  Once saved, FiscalNote will store this Report for you, accessible from Reports in the collapsible menu on the left:

You can either download this as a PDF or share electronically.  We recommend using Shared Links whenever possible.  The recipient has the ability to click into any bill on the report and access the full text:

The recipient of the Shared Link Report also has access to something called a shared bill page for each bill included (click here to learn more about sharing FiscalNote content).  It allows them to click through information as if they were in the platform, even without access to FiscalNote. 

A shared page offers an additional, holistic view of all efforts performed by you and/or the team, found under the Actions tab:

*Keep in mind that shared pages expire after 14 days.

We now have an interactive, fully comprehensive list of all Vehicle Safety legislation the team has been monitoring this session, along with detailed efforts to promote or halt each bill listed.

Future Report Updates

Because this Report was built using the 'Select All' drop down for selecting matches on the Reports screen, there is no need to recreate this Report in the future.  An updated version can be accessed by simply refreshing it:

*Click here to learn more about Legislative Reports and customization options.

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.