Five ways to use Legislata as a journalist to power your productivity

Legislata was created to help those working in the political arena to be more efficient and effective in their workday. Here’s five tips on using it if that workday takes place in the press.

1. Keep track of who’s who

Politics is about people. Sometimes, though, there’s too many people to easily remember who they are.

Let’s say you’re covering the State House and email frequently with different staffers who are constantly changing jobs. How do you remember which staffer works for which legislator? Every reporter has their own system, but wouldn’t it be easiest to have a contact where all the information you think is most relevant pops up on the screen when they email?

Legislata will automatically create a contact for anyone who emails you, and you can manually create contacts as well. You can tag a contact (like, “Rep. Smith comms director,” “health policy expert,” “fast response time,” etc) directly from your inbox and search through tags in the database.

2. Ensure accountability and visibility on the work being done

Working in the political world can involve a lot of juggling. Tracking multiple bills, going to different events, or getting ready for the long-term while putting out short-term fires. At local papers, this can become a real handful as everything gets assembled. 

With Legislata, tasks can be distributed to those in your organization with responsibility for them. These tasks can be associated with bills or issues to make sorting them easier. All tasks are then visible across the entire office. If there’s a backlog brewing, you’ll be able to spot it early and make sure it gets resolved before it becomes a problem, all within the same system.

3. Track messages that matter

Frequently, you’ll want to know what elected officials, civic leaders, or other important stakeholders have said about certain issues. The Messages feature can be used to bring all those statements together and more easily trackable.

In Messages, you can log a statement with who said it, what bill or issue it’s related to, and their position on it. That will save you time later when you need to check everything legislators have said on a bill within searching through notes that may not be associated with all the data you need.  

4. Log emails to bills

Perhaps you receive lots of press releases from legislators. You can log those emails as pertaining to a specific bill or issue. This can help generate a simple data picture of what issues you’re hearing the most about (in case that helps guide coverage) and later more quickly find the statements about a certain topic (parts of this feature are still in development).

5. Watch bills progress

Legislata offers a database of bills for all fifty states with the last action taken on it. You can use this to see the bills that have been most recently updated and where they are going. This simplifies the process of bill tracking and lets you connect your messages and tasks to the bills within the same system. Note: more bill tracking features are in development. Get in touch to let us know what else you’d like to see.

… and much more

There’s lot of other ways Legislata can help your office. Contact us to find out more and to sign up for our beta test.