How much time will Legislata save you?
We built Legislata to save time for everyone who works in politics. If you’re a city councilor, state legislative aide, municipal candidate for office, journalist, advocate, or member of a local town party committee, this software gives you a place for your political email, political task management, and political contacts.
Once we built it, we immediately wanted to know just how much time it could save.
So we ran a test to simulate a day’s worth of emails that may come into a typical politico’s inbox. This is, of course, just a demonstration, but it should give a sense of the power of Legislata and how efficient our inbox dashboard is. In the interests of transparency, we have the full methodology behind the test below, so you can compare the demonstration with your own work habits and estimate how much time you’ll save.
Components of the test
After talking with a number of people in politics, we decided to test going through 50 emails, which was a common daily amount for municipal officials and a round number that made the math simple for anyone with more than that.
We'll be going through five types of emails, each of which will have ten emails we'll have to get to.
Emails to be read and need no further action.
Emails about an issue where the constituent and the issue need to be logged. A standard template response must be sent. We’ll assume that there are five different issues in this batch of emails.
Emails that require a task to be created, like an email that requires you to look into a regulation later.
Emails that have a bit of information about a contact we want to remember, such as someone introducing themselves as the new liaison from an executive branch.
Emails that require you to send a standard response, log the issue that the email relates to, forward the email to someone (like a staffer or an executive liaison), and create a task for the email.
For each of these components, here’s what we assume the user does:
Log the issue an email relates to: Open a spreadsheet about that issue, include the name, email address, date sent, and position of that email.
Create a task: Open a task management app and create a new task.
Log information about a contact: Open a CRM and add a tag to their profile or create a new one.
Forward the email: Type in the email you’re forwarding to.
And here’s what the user will have in Legislata before getting to their inbox:
Templates for standard email responses (in the regular email, we’ll also have templates to make it fairer).
Workflow for the process in Category 2 and 5 emails. A workflow can be created in under a minute and you can make workflows for all the routine steps you need to take.
As for any email that requires a thoughtful response, where most of the time is spent deliberating on the right words, that will be the same time in Legislata or in a typical email client. This test is focused on how much time you can cut down on all the mindless admin to let you have more time for crafting the right responses or getting to other work.
The Results
Using Legislata saved 63% of the time spent on manual email correspondence.
Using a manual process took 33 minutes and 12 seconds. Using Legislata took 12 minutes and 14 seconds.
Here’s why.
The biggest savings were in Category 2 emails (70% less time) and Category 5 (84% less time). Both of these types of emails relied on Workflows, where you can pre-select multiple actions to trigger with just one button. In Category 2, we wanted to log the email as pertaining to an issue and send a template response. In Category 5, we had to reply to the email, forward it, log the email, and create a task. Each of those steps in a manual process required a lot of clicks, typing out email addresses, and moving to another sheet to log it. With Legislata, everything happened with a single drop-down menu.
However, as we were conducting the test, we found that the biggest benefit wasn’t the time saved.
Of course, that matters. Cutting down on time spent in the inbox by nearly two-thirds is a huge help to people in politics who spend half their working time dealing with emails.
But more than spending time, we found that in the manual process, we had to constantly shift back and forth between our inbox, multiple spreadsheets (to log information on constituents and issues), and a task manager. It was too easy to lose track of our place or mis-copy-and-paste. Even after all the work, we didn’t have a connected database. The tasks did not directly link to the emails. The information on what constituents cared about was separated by spreadsheets.
When working in Legislata, not only were we working much faster, but everything happened in our Inbox view. Adding information on constituents, creating tasks, and logging emails was possible without ever switching screens. And the end result was a connected database of emails, tasks, issues, and contacts. Each one a data point that helps inform the larger picture.
We saved time on our emails and had an easier time doing so.
Sign up, try out the Pro plan for free, and let us know what you think.