At Plural, our top priority is delivering the right public policy data to you, when and how you need it. Our platform is designed to categorize and deliver policy intelligence that is:
- Comprehensive – You’ll never miss a bill.
- Relevant – Targeted searches cut through the noise so you get only what matters.
- Timely – Notifications arrive when you need them, in a format that’s easy to digest.
Beyond data delivery, Plural’s AI-powered analysis, intuitive interface, and collaboration tools help policy professionals act on insights more efficiently.
Stay in Control of Your Notifications
In this blog, we’ll show you how Plural’s customizable legislative bill notification settings let you receive updates at the cadence that best fits your workflow. We’ll also walk through an example of how different team members might automate their notifications to meet their specific needs.
Plural’s Four Notification Types
Plural organizes notifications into four distinct categories, making it easy for teams to optimize their data delivery. Each team member can adjust the frequency—or opt out—of any notification type to ensure they’re getting just the right amount of information.
Bill Update Notifications
Most Important For: Understanding Key Bill Movements
Plural will send you alerts of recent action on bills you are tracking in Plural via Bill Update Notifications. These emails will include each of your tracked bills with new actions, alongside a description of that new action and a link to visit the bill page within your Plural instance. Users leverage bill update notifications to keep their eye on the progress of the bills that matter to them most and to be the first informed about an upcoming public hearing or vote.
Saved Search Notifications
Most Important For: Bill Discovery
Plural’s saved search tool can do your team’s discovery work for you. After crafting a search that returns the bills a user cares about, they can save it to run constantly in the background and be alerted anytime a new result matches that search criteria. Saved Search Notifications highlight the newly introduced or amended legislation that your team needs to be aware of.
Recommended Bills Notifications
Most Important For: A Second Layer of Bill Discovery
In addition to the bills surfaced by your saved searches, Plural offers an additional tool to enhance your bill discovery through Recommended Bills. These recommendations, sent once weekly, are based on issue areas that matter to you. While these results are less tailored to your specific use case, they can serve well as an additional net to capture any legislation of interest you may have missed, or to monitor the pulse of an issue area within a jurisdiction.
Collaboration Notifications
Most Important For: Monitoring Team Activity, Engaging Team Members
Unlike similar tools, Plural was built with collaboration in mind. We understand that policy isn’t made in a vacuum and that advocacy teams must work with various (internal and external) stakeholders in their efforts to fight for their communities. Plural’s collaboration features allow you to easily share legislation, curate bill lists alongside team members, and collaboratively markup policy proposals. Collaboration notifications alert you to this activity, This can be especially useful for communication with stakeholders who may not be in the tool every day. If I know that I will need to ask our legal counsel questions periodically, but that they won’t be doing day-to-day tracking, I can ensure they have just their collaboration notifications turned on so that when I tag them in a bill asking for feedback I know it will stand out in their inbox.
Customizing Your Notifications
Each user has full control over which notifications they receive and how often. You can choose to get updates in real time, daily, or weekly.
Beyond these basic settings, Plural offers even more customization. Users can enable notifications for specific saved searches or adjust settings within individual workspaces. Many teams take advantage of this flexibility by setting general updates to daily or weekly while keeping real-time alerts for their most critical bills.
Example Use-Case: Policy Tracking for a Multi-layered, Distributive Team
Suppose Civic Eagle Associates (CEA) tracks state legislation across the country for their clients. CEA has a team of policy staff tasked with identifying new legislation that may be of interest to their clients, legislative consultants who create reports for clients, and legal counsel offering analysis to legislative consultants.
- Policy Staff would benefit from turning on saved search emails at a daily cadence. This would allow them to log on each day with a list of bills to analyze to determine whether they fit into a client’s legislative interests. Bill update notifications would be less important to this group as they are primarily interested in bill discovery.
- Legislative Consultants, on the other hand, could use saved search notifications sparingly but would want bill update notifications turned on at a daily or as soon as possible cadence. These bill notification emails could serve as the starting point for the updates they will send to their clients. Legislative Consultants would also turn their collaboration emails on to ensure they are updated when they receive a tag from Legal Counsel or Policy Staff.
- Legal Counsel, who in this scenario is largely involved only when their analysis is needed, could rely primarily on collaboration emails to alert them whenever their help is needed.
Conclusion
Every year, we help thousands of users cut through the noise and stay on top of the legislative action that matters most to them. Customizable notifications are a key part of making this possible. With Plural, policy professionals can trust that they’re receiving accurate, timely updates tailored to their specific needs. Teams can align notifications with their workflows and responsibilities, improving efficiency in their advocacy efforts.
As we continue expanding our data, enhancing our tools, and refining the user experience, we’ll keep evolving our alert system to deliver even more value.
