How does Legislata compare to bill trackers?
Political professionals often subscribe to legislative information services. They provide updates and insights into what’s happening in the legislative process and vary by their scope and jurisdiction. Some are focused on a single state; others provide coverage of Congress and all 50 states (plus DC). Some are based heavily on subject-matter experts and human reporting, others focus on webscraping. But all offer important help to government affairs professionals looking to know what’s going on in the halls of power.
Legislata also offers updates on legislation. So how do we differ from the bill trackers already out there?
Why subscribe to a bill tracker?
Politics is based on information. If you work as a lobbyist for the solar panel industry, you would have wanted to know whether Build Back Better was truly dead or not in early 2022 so that you could plan your year’s strategy. You would have also wanted to know the second that Sen. Joe Manchin expressed support for climate funding so that you could be ready to take advantage of a newly changed situation.
That is, in short, the use case of a bill tracker. If you need to know what’s going on with a bill or topic, you can pay a service to keep you up to date with it. They will send you email updates or provide access to an online database and, generally speaking, keep you aware of what’s happening.
It’s a relatively simple proposition and many provide a great service. Given that the alternative is hiring more staff to follow every change on Congress’ website or to monitor every press release that comes out of a state legislature, they can also be quite cost-effective.
What bill trackers don’t have
However, there are downsides to subscribing to a bill tracking service (as there are to any information service) as your only way to know what’s happening in politics.
First, they cost money. It’s not cheap to collect all that information, however it’s done, and businesses want to make profits. That may be fine for a large firm or lobbying group, for whom it’s still cheaper than hiring a whole in-house team to follow events. But for small organizations or individuals, even a relatively cheap service can be too much. It may be in their interest simply to check the public websites of State Houses and Members of Congress on a daily basis rather than pay for updates.
It may take more time to assemble, but most information about politics is already available in the public domain
Second, they focus on information from elected officials and governmental bodies. These are, of course, the most important actors in any political situation, but they’re not the only one. Often, you might want to know what major nonprofits, or unions, or activists are saying about a bill. Depending on the bill tracking service, that wouldn’t be included.
Third, they don’t always provide context. Many bill trackers will have contextual information about a bill, or the probability of its success. But not all do and that information may be wrong. Politics is an inherently difficult business to forecast and inherently up for debate. Having smart people offer their advice is good; having smart people offer a range of opinions is better.
How Legislata differs
We embrace the concept of the marketplace of ideas and apply it to understanding politics and policy.
We provide bill tracking and some automatic updates on what’s happening in Congress and some states, as with the below screenshot covering legislative updates and press releases in Congress.
Our Congress office has press releases and legislative updates
However, we know that we cannot possibly cover all the information that you need for your work. Therefore, we make it easy for users to share their own information or create their own informational services within the platform to help other users.
For example, in our Massachusetts office, we automatically post actions on legislation, new events at the State House, and a roundup of state legislators’ tweets. Members of that office (it’s free to join) are welcome to share statements and other news, tagged with the bill, topic, issue, person, or organization that it relates to. It’s more predictable than sending a tweet out into the ether and hoping the right audience finds it and easier to incorporate into research when searching for a particular bill.
You can join as many offices as you’d like and set up as many notifications as you want to craft your own informational feed - more like a social network than a single business provider.
Plus, like a social network app, we provide the platform for you to share your own information. Maybe you have a better take on Massachusetts politics than we do, and want to annotate legislation with how it might affect the budget. Create your own public office on the site (our term for workspaces or groups) and invite others to join or subscribe. Whatever your area of expertise, from the broadest coverage of the presidential race to the most niche topic in a single city, Legislata is a place for you to share and learn, in a system designed for politics.
What’s coming next
Our hope is that Legislata can serve as the platform for the informational ecosystem that underpins politics. We are not a direct replacement for bill tracking services (indeed, we think a lot of them are great and hope they use us to reach their audience), but an approach to managing information that takes advantage of the fact that no one could be more of an expert or possess more data than the political and policy community as a while.
We’re planning to introduce monetization and paywalls in 2023. Get in touch if that would be of interest to you. We’re also introducing a feature that lets you monitor an issue or create crowd forecasts. It allows you to turn your audience into a community or to communicate in numbers if that’s better suited to the question at hand.
You can, of course, sign up for free to get started or schedule a demo.