Did your public policy team give it their all during the home stretch of the state legislative session? It may seem like the time to rest, but if you’re between sessions, there’s still plenty your team can do to keep advancing your issue.
To help you hit the ground running, we’ve rounded up how you can use your legislative technology tools between sessions to get ahead. Trust us, you don’t want to wait until the session starts to get your ducks in a row.
Read on for tips to optimize your strategy, streamline your public policy team communications, and be prepared for any special sessions.
Tactic 1: Understand Your Impact During the Legislative Session
When the 2022 legislative session ends, it’s the perfect time to refine your strategy for 2023.
Plural client Campaign Zero uses Plural to take a deep dive into the issues, researching the bill language that passed and analyzing the data from past sessions to inform future policy.
As you look over the data, your policy team can ask:
- Which issues got traction and which bills died?
- Which strategies worked and which ones didn’t work?
- What bill language passed that we can use going forward?
Another important part of your policy team’s audit? Communication and conversations with your community once the session is over. With legislative tracking software like Plural, you can use public tags to draw attention to key findings or export data to share at a debrief meeting.
Finally, public policy teams may know how issues played out in their own state, but between sessions is an ideal time to look at what happened in other states. Capturing those details can inform your action plan for the next session.
For more detailed steps on how to get ready for the 2023 session, download our free eBook: How to Prepare for the 2023 Legislative Session
Tactic 2: Streamline Communication and Capture Relevant Details
Instead of reverting back to email to communicate once the session is over, continue to use your legislative tracking software to organize your public policy plans and keep everyone in the loop.
Not only can you sum up wins and losses from the previous session, but you can also use Plural’s Workspaces feature to capture relevant threads of conversations in a central place, so your public policy team can easily find what they need. You can even create a Workspace just for sharing information with your community, membership, or public policy leaders. Plural client YWCA of Minneapolis took advantage of this feature to get the word out to community members.
Tactic 3: Brush Up on Your Knowledge of Legislators and Build Relationships
Even when the legislature is not in session, your team will need to continue to build relationships with elected officials who may become authors of sponsored legislation.
For that reason, between sessions is an excellent time to see what bills legislators authored, and whether or not they ended up being co-author of a bill affecting your issue. You can use this information to decide which legislators you want to build relationships with going forward.
You can also use your legislative tracking software to update your team on any elections where a member or senator is in danger of being replaced—and make a plan of action ahead of the next session.
Tactic 4: Be Prepared to Act During Special Sessions
While a state legislative session has a finite start and end date, special sessions can be called in most states at any time.
The COVID-19 pandemic and Supreme Court decisions putting trigger laws into effect are just two recent examples of this often-overlooked tactic. You’ll want to keep using your legislative tracking software to stay on top of any emerging developments.
Just ask the Center for Economic Inclusion (CEI). During the pandemic, CEI tracked multiple special sessions in Minnesota to see what policies would impact their communities. Plural helped them stay organized and connected to their community.
At the same time, lawmakers may not be passing legislation between sessions, but your public policy team will still want to stay on top of what’s happening at the Capitol. There may be hearings or committee meetings that will affect your issue when the session returns.
Use Your Legislative Tracking System Year-Round
State legislative sessions are usually short—public policy teams must make the most of every moment.
Plural is a tool designed to keep your public policy team ready to for action at all times. So when a new session starts—or a special session is called—you don’t have to rebuild your efforts from the ground up across multiple channels. Using Plural between sessions will have your team ahead of the curve and ready to keep focusing on the win from day one.
