Using Committee Pages to Your Advantage: Best Practices

• Introduction
• Preparing for Sessions
  • ACT: Add to Issue, Categorize with Labels, Track with Follow
• Documenting Your Work
• Creating One Source of Truth for Record-Keeping & Reporting
• Best Practices: Using Committee Pages 1-pager

Introduction

Whether working alone or as a team, there are a number of tools that committee pages have to offer to help streamline your work.  Use them as collaborative hubs to centralize your work, but try leveraging a few best practices to help make everyone's day more efficient, such as knowing when to use a Private Note vs. and Organizational Note.  Read below to learn more about a few best practices we've collected from your peers that have found success with using committee pages to their advantage.

Preparing for Sessions

We highly recommend using down time between legislative sessions to prepare for the upcoming session.  Understanding which committees will be important should take high priority, as they can have some of the highest influence on legislative movement (or lack thereof).  

ACT: Add to Issues, Categorize with Labels, Track with Follow

Before sessions begin, it's important to line you and/or your team up for success.  Review the past session's work and look to potential future initiatives to understand: (1) Who are your top committees, (2) How they may impact your work, and (3) What committees require a close eye moving forward.

Add to Issue: Who are your top committees, per Issue?

**Click here to learn more about streamlining your work with an Issues Management approach

Categorize with Labels: How do they impact your work?

Track with Follow: Which committees require close monitoring?

NOTE: Follow is only available on the Federal level

Follow Federal committees to get updates via email when hearings are scheduled for markups, voting sessions, business meetings, and more.  Emails will look like the following:

Documenting Your Work

We highly recommend using Actions to summarize activity, such as individual meetings of interest, key takeaways from a critical email, or documenting important hearing updates.  When creating an Action from a committee page, the committee will already be tied to the record:

Add specific, individual members with whom you interact to those Actions to glean insights over time:

‘Engagement' under ‘Basic Information’ displays a percentage breakdown, showing members you have interacted with vs. those you have not:

Quickly add new Actions from the engagement section and use the analysis to understand the reach of your work over time.

Creating One Source of Truth for Record-Keeping & Note-Taking

Documenting engagement by tying Actions to committees is great for individual record-keeping and reporting, and also teamwork. As you and other team members add Actions, your organization's relationship with the committee begins to take shape over time via a running list of referenceable activity:

Include other important resources such as external Files and Links to keep all important updates in one location, accessible by all team members from FiscalNote:

Add Notes to clarify any ambiguous details for you and/or your stakeholders:

Furthermore, Group Notes allow a few members of a team working in FiscalNote to share sensitive information with each other, without running the risk of other colleagues seeing it.

Regardless of the nature of your work, committee pages serve as the perfect location to organize and collaborate.

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.