Five ways to use Legislata as an elected official or staffer 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 a State House or City Hall.

1. Get through form emails quickly

If you use Microsoft Office 365 (and if you use Outlook, you probably do), you can connect your email to Legislata to save time. Often, you’re inundated with form emails requiring you to respond and to record the email. That requires two separate steps, over and over, likely switching back and forth between your inbox to reply and a spreadsheet to see if it was for or against. 

Using the workflow tool in Legislata, those two steps can be created in advance and then completed in three clicks. See the email. Notice the issue/bill/position. Click the Workflow button, select the workflow needed, click apply. Within seconds, you’re done with that email and can move onto the next one. And if it’s not a form email but you need to log it, you can do that from within your inbox.

2. Automatically save contacts and tag them quickly

Elected officials may interact with thousands of people over the course of a year. Even the best need help recording and remembering them.

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, “local party chair,” “city councilor,” “unemployment liaison,” etc) directly from your inbox and those tags will show up when they next email. All of a sudden, your entire office has visibility on who is who with minimal effort.

3. Manage tasks efficiently

A state representative once told us that he would ask his staff to do a dozen things on Monday and by Friday have forgotten half of them. This is inevitable given the volume of information and the pressures of the rest of the job.

With Legislata, you can create a task and assign it to someone in your office. Tasks are visible to everyone, so that there is transparency on the state of each project. Perhaps best of all, you can create a task from your inbox and have it remember the originating email. If you receive an email from a constituent that says, “Can you look into this and get back to me?”, you’ll no longer have to write that down, remember to complete the task, and then trying to find the right email to respond to. It’s stored in the task for your convenience so you can check it off and move onto the next task.

4. Track and share information in your state or Congress

Your work is not just about constituent casework, which is why Legislata is more than just case management software.

We allow you to track bills and other information in one of our state groups and for Congress. Imagine if there were a Twitter feed or Facebook Group just for the basic information that underpins our political system.

We upload some forms of information, like bills at the state and federal level and press releases for Congress. If there’s anything you’d like to share that you don’t already see - from hearing testimony to a new event to council meeting notes - you can upload them yourself. And if there’s a community you don’t already see, from your city to an issue area, you can create and moderate it yourself.

5. Set up notifications to stay on top of what matters

One thing we know is that working in elected office means staying on top of a lot of different areas. Fortunately for users of Legislata, they can set up notifications based on any tag in the system and from any group they join.

This means that a Comms Director can set up an alert within their own office for anything tagged “Press Clipping” so that the intern doesn’t need to email them every morning. They can also set up an alert within their own state for a bill they’re working on. And they can set up an alert for press releases from their Member of Congress.

Every notification will be seen in a single feed in the app and in a single roundup email in the morning (though you can also choose to receive emails for each alert). It helps you save time and get started with your day faster.

… and much more

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