How does Legislata compare to constituent case management software?
Elected officials may use specialized software to manage their constituent case work. Many will also use typical office software (like Microsoft Excel or GSuite) to handle constituent cases.
Legislata can be used for managing constituent cases. So how do we differ from options already out there in the market?
What’s constituent case management?
Constituent case work is the underrated part of the job as an elected official. In an informal survey conducted in December 2020, we found that staffers and elected officials spent 50% of their time on constituent cases. One respondent even said that with all the constituent cases he had to manage, he should have gotten a degree in social work instead of political science.
Case management software is anything designed to help facilitate this work. Many are applying the principles of customer service software or other task management work to the political space. The process of using the software often goes something like:
The user (elected official or staffer) creates a new case for a constituent.
The user writes down all the information needed for the case.
Once the case has been resolved in real life, the case is marked resolved in the software.
Existing case management software may have other bells and whistles as part of this process, but the above are the basics that all follow and are the foundation of all products, whether they’re designed specifically for politics or a standard productivity app you’re using for casework.
Case management in Legislata
If you want the basics for a constituent case management product, you can do it in Legislata for free.
On our free tier, you can create posts that are tagged with contacts, such as the constituent and the member of your office assigned to the task, as well as the topic of the case. Members of your office can set up notifications for their own names or topics that they cover so that Legislata alerts them as soon as a post is created for a case. You can use the post to log all the elements of the case. You can comment on the post to log updates to the case. When it’s finished, you can mark it with the topic tag “Resolved.”
With our Team and Pro tiers, you have even more features that help you get through your work faster.
In our Team tier, you can log messages from constituents, including on whether they support or oppose a bill (which isn’t case management but is related to constituent work).
In our Pro tier, you can connect your Microsoft Office 365 email to automatically create contacts, see context on existing contacts, and save time with multi-step workflows. In a trial run, we cut down the time required to respond to emails by 63%.
Inbox connection with the contact tags to the right
How Legislata differs
Although Legislata offers the same customer service-oriented ways to save time with constituent case management, we’re really an informational platform.
Before your eyes glaze over at what sounds like tech sector jargon, let us explain why that matters.
Rather than a specific software designed purely for managing constituent cases, we help you work with your political, policy, or governmental information in one place. That means in one location you can work on:
Constituent cases
Collecting press clippings
Tracking meeting notes
Logging support and opposition on bills from constituents and other stakeholders
General task management within your office
Bill tracking
Sharing press releases and other statements with your network
Reading the press releases and other statements from other people in your network'
… and much more.
This allows you to connect all the different pieces of information that you work with. Rather than your meeting notes on a topic being in one place, your pile of constituent cases on that topic in another, and your list of tasks about that topic in a third app, everything can in on Legislata and shown to you when you go to that topic’s dashboard.
It’s a way to allow your constituent cases to not only be resolved speedily and efficiently, but to add to the database of your overall work and give you a better sense of what’s happening in your network.
What’s coming next
Our hope is that Legislata can serve as the platform for the informational ecosystem that underpins politics. We have new features in the works, but want to hear from you about what you need most.
You can, of course, sign up for free to get started or schedule a demo.
The Team and Pro tiers have a 4-week free trial (no credit card needed), so please get started and give them a run through before paying a single cent.