Category: Product

Is Plural the right policy tracking tool for your organization in 2024? To determine if Plural is right for you, consider these key questions.

The 2024 legislative sessions are right around the corner. Kentucky, Mississippi, and Ohio, among other states, will convene on January 2nd. Many more states will convene in the first few weeks of 2024. Is your team prepared?

Use this guide to determine if Plural is the ideal fit for your organization’s needs. Plural streamlines your legislative tracking process, making it simpler and more efficient.

Deciding if Plural Is Your Ideal Software Solution

To determine if Plural is the right tool for you, consider these key questions.

Enhancing Collaboration, Communication, and Information-Sharing

Do you collaborate with colleagues and external stakeholders on policy coverage?

At Plural, we know effective policy work doesn’t happen in a vacuum – it’s a collaborative effort. That’s why we never charge per seat, so you can add every member of your team, plus external stakeholders. Plus, Plural offers unlimited, free onboardings and trainings. We’re your partner in ensuring that your entire team is making the most of Plural.

Is communication and organization a pain-point within your team?

Plural allows for efficient organization of conversations about bills, replacing cumbersome email chains. Create unlimited, secure workspaces to collaborate with your team. Organize workspaces by issue area, jurisdiction, client, and more. Use annotation and note-sharing tools to share crucial policy information with team members. Plural ensures everyone is on the same page.

Is it beneficial for you to share information with external allied organizations?

Plural enables you to invite external organizations to your Workspaces. This fosters easier collaboration and information sharing on legislative matters. Plus, Plural’s public tags offer a clear, customizable system to organize and share bills. Plural transforms how policy teams manage, categorize, and communicate legislative information.

Assessing Satisfaction with Current Legislative Tools

Are you relying on a spreadsheet and state legislative websites for policy tracking?

Plural eliminates the risk of missing important updates on bills you’re monitoring. Receive instant updates on bill updates, like amendments or committee changes. Further, you can make use of tags for convenient labeling, easy access, and seamless organization.

Are you satisfied with your current legislative tracker and policy management setup?

Plural offers a more streamlined, intuitive approach to keeping up with legislative developments. Its seamless design, premium data, and organizational capabilities will enhance your experience. More and more policy experts are making the switch from legacy tools to Plural.

The 2024 legislative sessions are right around the corner — is your team ready? When it comes to policy tracking tools in 2024, you have many options. Plural’s tailored solutions are perfectly catered to your team’s size, budget, and needs.

In 2022, total federal lobbying spending skyrocketed to $4.1 billion – the highest since 2010. With conglomerates dishing out millions of dollars to advocate for and against policies on both the state and federal levels, organizations with tighter budgets face an uphill battle.

Plural’s expanded legislative tracking, stakeholder management, and collaboration offerings come at a time when full participation in the policy creation is crucial. Plus, Plural is a minority and women-owned technology company that’s committed to innovation. When you choose Plural as your tool of choice, you won’t be getting an outdated legacy tool or supporting a company with a culture of just pandering to stakeholders. We are continually innovating ways to make our data impactful, and we’re committed to doing the right thing. Plural users are happy and productive.

Let’s dig into your options.

Plural Free Account

A free Plural account is perfect for the individual who wants to stay civically engaged on public policy. Thousands of Plural users take advantage of our free offering. With a free account, you’ll access best-in-class legislative data from 53 jurisdictions — all 50 United States, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and U.S. Congress. You can also search and track bills across all 53 states and jurisdictions.

Worried that a free tool won’t be robust and accurate? The old rule of “you get what you pay for” is a thing of the past. Not only does Plural offer the most robust legislative data, but it’s also the most intuitive and easy-to-use tool on the market. We scrape our data more frequently than our competitors, with a custom cadence that’s catered to each legislature. With Plural, your days of getting caught with outdated information are over.

Think you’ll need more? Don’t worry — once you create a free account and start using Plural, you can upgrade anytime.

Plural Basic Plan — NEW!

Plural’s Basic Plan is perfect for small teams who only need to track one jurisdiction, but still need expanded functionality. 

With Plural’s Basic Plan, you can search and track bills in one state, get custom alerts for your tracked bills, and get real-time alerts on saved searches. It comes with full access to Plural for two users, who can create one collaborative workspace for notes, issue management, and more. Plus, you can create customizable markups, shared notes, and annotations on bills, and upload external files. Teams who use this tier really appreciate the high quality data and ability to collaborate.  

We recently created our Basic Plan for those small policy teams that need to pack a punch. Sound familiar? In the world of public policy, being the first to know and getting your team on the same page as fast as possible is the key to success. Plural’s Basic Plan will help you achieve your goals. With our Basic Plan, we’ve taken our robust legislative data and paired it with powerful organization and collaboration tools. However, at the same time, we know that budget is often a pain point for small policy teams. That’s why our Basic Plan is just $3,500 per year.

Plural’s Premium Plan

Plural’s Premium Plan is perfect for multi-jurisdiction public policy teams, advocacy groups, and researchers. In addition to searching and tracking  bills, organizing your work, and collaborating with your team, you can unlock revolutionary tools to deepen your policy insights and enhance your collaboration. 

And with unlimited secure digital workspaces, you can create a home for every team, client, or campaign — annotate bills, share analyses, and plan next steps all in one place. What’s more, you can easily export your data for reporting and further analysis.Plural allows you to give up legacy systems and spreadsheets. Plus, we never charge per seat. With Plural, you can collaborate with anyone on your team (or even external stakeholders!) without concern for additional fees.

Coming Soon to Plural

If you missed our product roadmap webinar, we just announced these new features that are available now to Plural users:

• Vote data. Plural users can now see how a bill was voted on, or how Legislators have voted on certain bills in Plural right alongside your work. We want to help save you time tracking a bill’s movements, and also make it easy to share vote information in multiple formats, like a legislative scorecard for example. Vote data can be found both on a Bill or Legislator’s activity feed.
• Federal staffer data. We know that managing relationships and discussing legislative priorities with lawmakers is critical, but can be labor-intensive. With Plural, up-to-date information you need is at your fingertips. You can find federal staffer data on our new “Staff Directory” tab right on the Legislator’s page. Plus, state staffer data is also coming soon!
• Mention teammates. Tag or “@” mention your teammates (similar to other collaboration or messaging software like Slack, Microsoft Teams) If there’s a particular update on a bill, legislator, or any other update that you want to flag immediately for your teammates, simply mention them in the activity feed. Tagged teammates get notified directly in their inbox with the context and information they need. We know that collaboration is a crucial part of public policy work, and hope that this feature and others helps facilitate smooth and effective collaboration within Plural.

Want to learn more about any of the features mentioned above? It’s best to meet with one of our Policy Experts for a live demo in Plural.

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Explore More Resources for Public Policy Teams

Several of Plural’s advanced features can save you hours of time spent on manual tasks, so that you can spend more time on strategy and planning (and spend less time working overall!)

Digging Into Plural’s Advanced Features

Save Your Frequently Used Searches

Plural’s Saved Search feature allows you to save your frequently used searches. You’ll receive email alerts as new updates are available for your search criteria.

All saved searches are dynamic, so they’ll get updated as new legislative data becomes available. For example, as legislatures introduce new bills that match your saved search criteria, those bills will appear as results.

View Critical Information for Many Bills in One List

In Plural, you can choose to display your list of bill search results and tracked bills in “Table View” or “Cards View.”

Cards View lists key bill information, including the bill’s title, ID, session and committee. Table View adds to this information with bill status and latest action, in an easily skimmable format.

Table View saves you from having to click into individual bill pages one by one to get the most critical details about each bill.

Track Many Bills at Once

Tracking a bill in Plural allows you to keep a running list of all of your bills of interest in a single place. You’ll receive email alerts whenever there’s an update on any of your tracked bills.

When viewing a list of bill search results in Table View in Plural, you can select multiple bills to track at once.

With this same functionality, you can also quickly un-track multiple bills at once. This can be especially handy when cleaning out your Workspace in preparation for the next session.

Organize Many Bills into Multiple Virtual Folders at Once

In Plural, “Tags” are like virtual folders that you can organize your bills of interest into.vFor example, you can use Tags to label bills based on high priority/low priority, support/opposed, or by issue area.

When viewing a list of bill search results in Table View, you can select multiple bills to assign a tag to at once.

As with tracking, you can also un-tag multiple bills at once. Again, this can be especially handy when cleaning out your Workspace ahead of the next session.

BONUS: To keep a record of your tracked bills from past sessions, create a new tag with the session year and bulk-tag all of the bills before untracking them. This will create a new tag on the left sidebar with all of the bills you worked on in previous session(s), making it easy to access and reference them later.

Easily Share an Interactive List of Bills with External Audiences

Publishing a Tag allows you to quickly and easily share a group of bills with anyone, regardless of whether they have a Plural account. This can be especially useful when generating reports for external stakeholders, like clients and organization supporters.

Tags are fully customizable, and you can create as many as you’d like. Use tags to organize bills into categories such as “high priority/low priority,” “support/oppose,” or by topic area, like “education” or “housing.” After creating your tags, you can then assign one or more of the tags to your relevant bills. Then once you’ve published the tags, you can simply share the URL for the public tag in an email, website or text message.

When someone visits the link for your public tag, they’ll be able to click on any of the listed bills to view the bill page. This page includes full text of the bill as well as the bill’s author/cosponsor, status, committee, actions and vote history.

Find What You’re Looking For With Advanced Search Options

Using Plural’s filters and search preferences can be key to finding what matters to you. With Plural, you can narrow your search by legislature, session, bill status, and bill action.

Plus, you can use boolean operators such as quote marks, the “OR” operator and the “AND” operator to more quickly find what you’re looking for.

Identify Bills With the Highest Chance of Coming Up for a Vote

Thousands of bills are introduced each session, and sifting through them is labor intensive and time consuming. Plural’s AI-powered “Momentum Indicator” makes it easy to find what matters.

Bills with potential momentum will have a pulse icon next to the “Track” button and on their bill page.

You can also filter your search results to show only bills with potential momentum. 

Find Companion and Other Related Bills All in One Place

Within the “INTELLIGENCE” tab on a bill page, you’ll see any bills that share text with the bill you’re currently viewing. This is a quick and easy way to find companion bills or an ominous package.

Plural will also indicate the degree of text similarity between the related bill and the bill you’re viewing. This will give you an even clearer sense of the relationship between two or more related bills.

Discover Similar Bills Across Multiple Jurisdictions

Plural’s Global Bill Search tool helps you quickly analyze bill text and find commonalities in bills across all jurisdictions.

Within the “INTELLIGENCE” tab, you’ll find the Global Bill Search tool. In the Global Bill Search tool, you can select the legislatures in which you’d like to search for bills similar to the one you’re currently viewing.

After completing your search, you’ll be shown a list of bills from your selected legislatures containing a high degree of similar text.

Keep Individual and Shared Work Separate

Plural allows you to have a personal organization, in addition to your shared organization. In your shared organization, you can collaborate with colleagues on work. Your personal organization is for your own work and is not shared with others.

Within your personal organization, you can track bills, create tags, and save searches that will only be visible to you.

When working within your shared organization, you can share actions with any of your shared workspaces, or your personal workspace. This helps you avoid navigating back and forth between the two organizations.

Get Started With Plural’s Advanced Features

With Plural’s advanced features, it’s easier than ever to shape the future of public policy. Harness the power of Plural’s intuitive, AI-powered legislative tracking and stakeholder collaboration tool and get started today.