OurGov was initially conceived as a software platform for lobbyists. But as we’ve developed our tools and spoken with more people from different sectors of state government, we’ve realized its reach goes much further.
Everyone involved in state government deserves tools that help them do their jobs better. Three major groups OurGov aims to serve are lobbying teams, representative offices, and news agencies.
Below you’ll find how our tools can save lobbying teams time, energy and money. Next week you’ll learn the same for representative offices and news agencies.
Lobbying Teams
As mentioned, OurGov started with the idea of serving lobbyists and lobbying groups—be them in-house representatives for an organization, trade groups, or for-hire firms. Here are a few use cases:
Knowledge is power
There’s a lot of noise to sift through if you’re lobbying on behalf of a particular group. We help you get the signal you need from it so you can easily know all of what’s relevant to you and only what’s relevant to you.
Bill Compare
With our Bill Compare feature, you can quickly compare a bill from:
- a previous session
- the other chamber
to see what’s changed.
Filtering Tools
Our language processing algorithms are what set OurGov apart from our competitors. No one else can allow you to filter out event types that you don’t care about. Period.
To filter to specific legislative events, use the Home Feed’s filtering tool and select from various types of legislative events.
In addition to our advanced legislative event filtering, by subscribing to bills you can narrow the information you see happening within the government to those topics you care about.
Always be up to date
Notifications
In most cases, information is only as useful as it is timely. With our notification functionality, you’ll never be left in the dark. You can also immediately let your stakeholders know of updates to bills you’re working on.
We can notify you:
- immediately as changes happen (we get updates every ~5 minutes)
- daily (1-3 times/day)
- weekly
We currently support email notifications, and plan to add push (mobile) and text (SMS) notifications in the near future.
Coalition Building
Successful lobbying efforts require effective coalitions. That’s why we’ve made it easier to connect and collaborate with the right people.
Find similar interest groups
Coordinating with other lobbying teams can be a very effective way to communicate the breadth and importance a policy might have for a community.
OurGov shows you, inline with the bill, who is lobbying on what bills:
By request, we’ve also added the ability to easily reach out to principals who have registered activity on a bill. Just another way we’re making it easier for you to do your job.
Identify likely sponsors
Our tagging technology allows us to track which representatives are most closely aligned to different policies.
By navigating to a tag’s page, you’re able to see which representatives have sponsored the most bills related to the topic at hand.
As someone who is often engaged with legislators, you’re likely to know many of these legislators; but by using data like this, we’re almost certainly able to find a few coalition candidates for a new policy that may not have been obvious at first glance.
Team Coordination
Coordinating with your team often takes place over private channels, like text, email or Slack/Teams applications.
In order to determine:
- who’s working on what
- the status of various tasks
- coworkers advice/opinions on bills
you’d need to scroll back through old messages. With OurGov, all of these exchanges happen in the application.
Comment on bills
Commenting on bills is a great way to keep the work happening on a particular bill grouped in one location. No more scrolling back through old messages to find the information you care about.
Assign tasks
Managing your tasks inside of the tool you use to monitor legislation means you don’t need to contact switch and you can group all of the work being done on a bill together.
See notifications on coworkers’ bills
Your Home Feed can be customized to show you legislative events on bills that your coworkers follow. This ensures that you’ll never be out of step with any of the bills pertaining to your organization’s clients.
Interested in checking these features out? Click here to check out OurGov and start your free trial of OurGov Premium.