Best practices for using Legislata to turn your contact list into a comprehensive database

Politics is about people. Working in politics is about working with lots and lots of people, remembering who is who, and communicating that with everyone on your team. It’s a lot of information and can be difficult to manage. 

Legislata can help you keep track of everyone you interact with through three key features of our productivity software: 

• Automatic contact creation 

• Tagging 

• Office-wide posts 

Here are some tips for how to make the most of your contact database. 

Creating contacts 

When you use Legislata as your email client, we’ll create a contact every time you get an email from someone new. You can also manually add a contact, with multiple emails, phone numbers, and tags. It’s a fast way to start recording information about a person. 

These contacts are usefully stored at the level of the office, so if one person loads a new contact, everyone on their team will see it. No more duplicate work being done.  

Tagging 

In this email, James Garfield has written to Councilor Roosevelt about a park refurbishment. We assume Cllr. Roosevelt is busy and doesn’t have time to answer all her emails tonight. She wants to focus on those from her constituents, and she’ll get to the others later. 

Luckily for her, James has interacted with her office before and she, or her staffer, tagged him as “constituent.” This tag appeared automatically in the contact box next to her email, immediately alerting her to the fact that this was an email that needed her attention. 

Tags can be added to contacts as you continue to work with them. In the email, James mentions that he’s head of the city’s Boy Scout troop. That’s interesting information that might come in handy later, so Cllr. Roosevelt adds “Boy Scouts” to James’ entry. All from the inbox, while she’s answering his email. 

How you add tags and their format is entirely up to you. We recommend, however, that you ask your office to use a consistent style to make it easier to wade through all your contacts, which may run into the thousands depending on how large your network is. 

In Legislata’s office for the Massachusetts State House, we use a style of [Category]: [Type] to make it easier to keep track of everyone. As you can see in the below example, Rep. Bruce Ayers is a Democratic state representative in Massachusetts and a member of the Elder Affairs Committee. We therefore tagged him as Party: Democrat, Title: Representative, Chamber: Massachusetts House of Representatives, and Committee Member: Elder Affairs. 

We find that this standardizes how we tag and makes it easy to search through tags to find the groups of people we want. If we want to find all Committee Members for Elder Affairs, we don’t need to remember how a previous co-worker phrased it. We type in Committee Member: E... and Elder Affairs is suggested. Simple. 

Posting about a contact 

Let’s say that you have a long meeting with someone, and you want all the notes from that meeting to be saved and shared with your organization. Or you found out about what they think on a certain issue but it’s nuanced and requires some explanation. Or there is some biographical information that it’s important enough for a tag (like their college or favorite ice cream flavor) but could help smooth over future small talk. Whatever the reason, you have info about a person you want saved, but it’s too long for a tag. How do you store it? 

For this, you can use a post. It’s a simple process. Go to Posts, click New Post, and then type up the post. Tag it with the contact and whatever other issues are relevant. When preparing for a future meeting, you can search through the posts for that contact and find everything you need to know about them. Below we have notes from a meeting with James Garfield. When we next meet with him, we can search through our Posts for James Garfield, find this one, and be better prepared. We can also search for H1235 when that hearing is being held and this post will come up, meaning that this is not just a note in a rolodex, but useful on multiple fronts.

Additionally, you can comment on posts, so if there was an internal discussion stemming from that meeting about James’ ideas, it’ll be captured for when you need it later. All posts and comments are visible for the office the post is created in, so your colleagues’ work won’t have to be duplicated or shared in a cascade of email links. 

What else? 

Of course, that’s only the beginning of how useful Legislata can be for you. Sign up for the beta at app.legislata.com and/or check out our user guide here to find out more ways to boost your productivity and make sure nothing falls through the cracks.