Five ways to use Legislata in the private or non-profit sector to power your productivity

Source: Fibonnaci Blue, Creative Commons License

We created Legislata to help those working in the political arena to be more efficient and effective in their workday. It’s a new approach - a mix of social media, newsletters, and productivity apps - so we’re happy to provide a free demo of the product.

Here’s five tips on using it if that workday takes place outside the halls of government (but cares about what happens in them).

1. Streamline the information you access and use

Frequently, you’ll want to know what elected officials, civic leaders, or other important stakeholders have said about certain issues. Or you’ll want to know when legislation has advanced. Or when a new event has been posted at the State House.

Those types of basic information have often been hard to work with. Not important enough for front page news, scattered among various websites, or even (especially for press releases) buried in journalists’ inboxes.

Legislata can act as a hub for all that information, sorted and tagged as appropriate.

You can see this in action in our state and Congressional Offices (“Office” is our term for a workspace or group). They are free to join and you can set up alerts for topics, contacts, or pieces of legislation. In one notification feed, you’ll see what matters to you, from a press release from a member of Congress to a committee announcing a new committee in a State House.

2. Share your thoughts with those who need to hear them

As anyone who has worked in politics know, it is not only the voices of those in elected positions who matter. Your statements, op-eds, and events shape the debate. You want to others to know what you’re saying and you want to know what others are saying.

This is where Legislata comes in. With our app, users have the capability to post their messages in a way that makes it easy for your peers to find it. No need to tweet out a press release and hope the algorithm looks kindly on it or email it out and hope it doesn’t get buried in an inbox.

Create a post in the appropriate office - or create your own public office and let others subscribe to you - and tag it with the legislation, topic, issue, or organization it relates to. Others who care about that topic in that space will be alerted to it or be able to easily search for it later.

You can also create internal or coalition spaces for these sorts of posts - like Slack channels that are more suited to announcements and memos you want to be seen, and not slip by in a flood of messages.

3. Monitors and Forecasting Tournaments

One of the newest features that we’ve implemented into Legislata are our monitors and forecasts. You can now create questions that you’d like to track or predict and update them with numerical values. The app will show you the latest prediction and averages of all predictions.

This could be used internally to track the prognosis of a bill in a way that cuts through waffly text. Or it can be used within a coalition to assess what strategy is the most likely to succeed (answers are anonymous). Or you can participate in large-scale forecasts to find insights that no single person may have.

We are launching our own forecasting tournament for 2023 soon. It will allow you to predict what is likely to happen across a variety of political questions, with cash prizes for the most accurate every quarter.

4. Twitter roundups

Want to know the impression your data and work makes? Legislata also offers services to provide twitter roundups for your accounts to see whether or not you’re in an informational bubble (and who to follow to break out of it, if so) and the informational environment of your followers and those mentioning you.

Collecting data from all the users who follow a specific individual or group is an excellent way to study the political environment of a certain area, and our focus on a large social media platform such as Twitter is the next step in discovering the habits of a district. 

We recently did a roundup regarding the recent midterm elections, analyzing candidates in swing seats, which you can read here. 

5. Get through your inbox faster with our premium features 

Legislata also offers premium features for those who want to integrate their workspaces even further. We offer features such as syncing your email into the app so that you can get through your inbox faster; logging constituent messages linked to a database of legislation; automatic support/oppose for legislation; and task management.

… and much more

There’s lot of other ways Legislata can help your office. Get in touch here to find out more. You can also sign up immediately and get started right away for free.