Author: Yemi Adewunmi

How Fredrikson & Byron pivoted to Plural to deliver with speed to its clients

Saddled with legacy technology and faced with a myriad of new legislation, Fredrikson & Byron needed to radically change its workflow in order to deliver results for their high-demand clients.

“Plural’s workflow and collaboration features are critical to us staying ahead of bills and operating from a position of clarity.”
— Cody Holliday, Public Policy Specialist & Registered Lobbyist

The Background

With a history spanning 7 decades Fredrikson & Byron started from humble beginnings and gradually evolved into a multidisciplinary and world-renowned firm of over 100 professionals serving top brands such as Buffalo Wild Wings, Target, and Blue Dot.

The Goal

Reduce the time it takes to discover bills and deliver actionable insight to clients.

For many firms, gaining insight around complex bills is a challenge— plus doing that across distributed teams can feel impossible. But for firms serving top tier clients, it’s a necessity if they want to deliver on the unique needs of their clients.

By leveraging artificial intelligence, it’s now possible to gain unprecedented insight into bills while never missing a new development through automated bill tracking— all while collaborating with remote teams. This means, greater clarity into bills, less time spent reviewing them, and more time on strategy and execution.

Workflow Transformation with Plural

The Problem

Fredrikson & Byron built an impressive portfolio of clients across 5 distinct issue areas. With a team of 10 managing the government relation practice, and an ever growing wave of legislation flooding their inboxes, Cody Holliday and his team were hard pressed to keep up with the fluid nature of the legislative process.

“Our workflow was critical to delivering to our clients. When a bill is introduced, our team reviews the bill, extracts the important elements and then translates it into actionable insight for our weekly reports. For us it was critical that we had a flexible and collaborative platform that helps us cover more ground.”

The legacy system the firm used lacked the speed and flexibility they needed to quickly find the legislative data they needed and the lack of customer support often left them stuck in the mud.

The Results

After rigorous analysis of available tools and their requirements, Fredrikson & Byron chose Plural. Immediately after adopting Plural, Cody and his team were able to quickly navigate bills, see deeper into the nuances of the bills they were tracking, and extract what mattered most for their clients.

With the intuitive workflow and artificial intelligence-driven bill discovery, Fredrikson & Byron significantly reduced the time between bill discovery and client engagement. As a result, they were able to replace the time spent on flipping through countless pages of legislation and spend more time on what mattered most— strategy and execution on behalf of their clients.

About | Plural helps government affairs teams and lobbying groups increase productivity, work remotely, enhance communication, and improves access to legislation across the country.

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5 things your team can do to adjust to remote advocacy

COVID-19 has impacted the way advocacy organizations are operating. We spoke with the Executive Director of Minnesota Voice, Wintana Melekin, about how she and her statewide nonprofit are adjusting to the new normal in her industry and adapting to operating remotely. Here are 5 tips for continuing to push your organization forward while working from home.

No. 1— Continue to leverage your ecosystem and network of partners to keep your programs and projects operating.

“Relationships don’t stop just because [of social distancing.]”

— Wintana Melekin; Executive Director, Minnesota Voice

Before coronavirus, Melekin and Minnesota Voice had set a goal to register 72,000 voters in Minnesota in time for the 2020 Elections in November. In order to keep on track of reaching its goals, Melekin is focused on maintaining the relationships within her ecosystem and partnering with groups where she can. For example, she’s leaning into her network by collaborating with the Secretary of State (MN) on a project to set up online voter registration.

No. 2— Build a process for remote work for your organization.

Be careful to assume that your in-person experiences can be simply replicated virtually. You want to recreate a sense of community and team comradery, but accept that there will need to be some adjustments made to your organization’s processes. You can start my researching recommendations and advice from teams that already operate a “remote-first” team culture. Many tech companies have shared blog posts and other content that can help you build your own process for your team. Plural shares their tips here on this blog.

No. 3— Gain buy-in from your team about the new process

This change will be new to everyone in different ways, but transparency is key. Help your team understand what the game plan is and what they can expect in the transition to remote work. Your team wants to know: what’s changed and what’s staying the same?

No. 4— Leverage technology to help you operate.

It’s a good thing that over the past several years new technology has emerged to help organizations conduct business digitally. Many of these software solutions may typically be popular among private sector companies but they can certainly provide value for public sector organizations. Tip: A lot of technology providers offer discounts on their software for nonprofit organizations – email or call them to see if you can get better pricing or extensions on free trials.

No. 5— Don’t forget to have fun.

Now more than ever, your team may need one another for support, encouragement or just to take their mind off of things. Remember to check-in with your team at the beginning of calls, on a personal level. Before coronavirus, those water cooler conversations, coffee breaks and team happy hours were opportunities for teams to connect. Try to reimagine these social experiences digitally — virtual happy hours and cocktail classes; book clubs; movie nights; mid-day coffee breaks.

These tips, and many more insights about remote advocacy, were shared during our webinar How to Keep Winning as a Remote Advocacy Team. You can catch the replay here: https://learn.civiceagle.com/win

Keep track of changes to bills, your notes, files, conversations, and more.

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How to keep up with COVID-19 using Plural

As the world reacts to the pandemic, governments are reacting as quickly as they can to address the impacts of COVID-19. New legislation in Congress and state legislatures around the country are emerging and are quickly changing.

Plural is an easy to use tool for keeping up with these changing policies as they move forward at both the state and federal levels of government.

In a few easy steps you can search, track, and be notified when a COVID-19 bill advances through the legislative process:

Sign up for Plural

Because we believe that policy professionals deserve the best tools for keeping up with legislation during this challenging time, we’re offering Plural for free until the end of April, no obligation.

Create a new team for your coronavirus legislation

Use the drop down in the navigation bar, select New Team, and add a name and description for this team.

Search for coronavirus bills

Go back to search, select the states you want to track bills in, and search for keywords like “coronavirus” and “covid-19.”

Track and organize coronavirus bills

Identify and begin tracking a bill for your new coronavirus team – think of it like a folder of relevant bills. You will be sent email notifications when bills you are tracking have changes for example to bill text, status or sponsors.

Keep track of changes to bills, your notes, files, conversations, and more with Plural – legislative intelligence and policy management software, made with policy professionals in mind.

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