Why Your Legislative Monitoring and Advocacy Efforts Should Be Year-Round

State-based advocacy and legislative monitoring is highly seasonal. Each January, advocates and lobbyists head to capitol buildings. Most will spend the majority of their working time there, extending into the spring. This active legislative period is the busiest time of year for policy professionals. But this doesn’t mean that the rest of the year is spent merely waiting for January to come around again. Instead, government relations at the state level requires organizational attention and resources year-round. Year-round attention produces effective results during the busy legislative session.

This doesn’t mean that policy professionals like yourself should stop taking those well-deserved post-session vacations. But developing an organizational understanding of what government relations work requires throughout the year helps your team plan their time and communicate their value to their organizations. 

So what does a year in state-based public policy tracking and advocacy look like? Below, we’ve split the year up into thirds and detailed what a team should focus on within each period. Of course, you often find yourself balancing additional responsibilities that aren’t tied to the legislative calendar. It’s necessary to adjust your yearly planning to allow for other busy periods. Doing so helps ensure your team is never (too) overwhelmed. 

It should be said that we know that states operate on different schedules. While the majority of states will spend the first third of the year in session, states like Massachusetts and California operate nearly year-round and are busiest in late summer. Adjust their calendars to align the “legislative session” third described below with your respective busiest months of the year at the capitol building. 

The First Third: Active Legislative Session

Once a state legislature is in session, it’s necessary to have your agendas, teams, software, and processes all in place. We’ll talk more about developing these later. You should be able to focus on operating within the legislature each day, and reacting to new developments. Within this time, three focuses are paramount: legislative monitoring or tracking, advocacy, and communications. 

Legislative monitoring and tracking can be done in many ways. Some teams opt for a spreadsheet, while others prefer an advanced legislative intelligence system. We recommend the latter for efficiency and efficacy. Simply put, this involves identifying bills of interest and following their path through the legislative process. 

Of course, advocacy takes many forms. In the state legislative space, advocacy involves impacting policy as it advances through the legislative process. This might include:

• Efforts to stop harmful bills
• Efforts to encourage the passage of priority legislation
• Using your expertise to advocate for amendments to bills

This work is, of course, informed by your legislative monitoring and tracking activities. When your tracker alerts you to an upcoming hearing on a bill, it can be an alarm for your team to organize an effort to gather speakers to testify. But the inverse is also true; advocacy informs your legislative tracking. Your organizing efforts should be logged into your tracker to best inform your legislative work going forward.

Finally, communication is always key, but deserves special focus during the legislative session. External communication to your communities, activists, and supporters proves your value as a source of knowledge. It also helps to keep listeners engaged on the issues. On the other hand, internal communication to organizational leadership or financial bakers helps ensure these key stakeholders are aware of your successes and important legislative information. After all, many policy professionals serve as translators between their organizations and the legislature. This communication must go both ways.

The Next Third: Digesting and Debriefing on the Legislative Session

The second period of our calendar is informed by the first period. This period really begins when the legislature adjourns (and hopefully after a few weeks of rest post-session). This time should center around analysis and, again, communication. 

Start by using your legislative tracker to glean two main analyses:

1. An End-of-Session Recap. This recap details a narrative of the legislative session and the impact that your team had. Notably, this should include bills that became law, as well as those that did not succeed. It should be shared with both internal and external stakeholders. Your end-of-session recap is your team’s opportunity to tell your story of the legislative session, including your accomplishments.
2. A Compliance Report. Focusing on just those bills that became law, this report informs compliance actions that must be taken as a result of new laws. This allows us to translate the impact of the bills we’ve been advocating on to our organization. It helps ensure we end up, and remain, in compliance ahead of the effective dates.

Both of these projects accomplish the two main goals of this period:

1. To digest and distill all of the legislative activity of the session
2. To ensure all necessary information gets into the hands of those who need it

A secondary goal during this period is relationship building, both with lawmakers and fellow advocates. As the capitol empties, their calendars (should) open up. The summer can be a great time to make the connections that there wasn’t time to make during session. Investing in this goal pays off in the form of more efficient and effective legislative sessions in the future.

The Final Third: Elections and Session Planning

Policy experts like yourself know that elections season includes many of the same faces as the legislative session, albeit in slightly different positions. Lawmakers become candidates, legislative aides become organizers, and constituents become voters. Regardless of your level of involvement in the electoral space, it’s important to keep track during this time period. Electoral outcomes determine the legislators you’ll be working with next year. C4s, or organizations that involve themselves in electoral work, tend to have more to do during this period. C3s and other more strategically conservative organizations take a back seat. Either way, following the outcome of state elections can inform. your communications and outreach strategy in the coming year.

At the same time, this final portion of the year is the last opportunity to prepare for the upcoming chaos that is session. Now is the time to assess our processes and resources, to ensure we have everything we need for success. One key aspect of this work is establishing internal stakeholders and knowledge-holders. This may involve identifying a specific content expert, or creating a whole committee. Regardless, these individuals or groups should be available as a resource when needed during session. It’s important to ensure access to internal expertise. These resources allow you to make decisions quickly during the heat of the session. 

This is also a time to research and develop your legislative agenda for the coming session. When I worked for a hospital system, we held meetings in each of our service areas about two months before session began. In these meetings, we heard the concerns and needs of each community. This feedback informed our legislative agenda, including specific bills we would aim to support as well as broader policy goals that might inform our action on many bills.

Overall, it’s important to use these last few months before session to set yourself and your team up for success. Communicating and documenting everything you’ll need before lawmakers convene is key.

Get Started With Plural

Successful legislative advocacy takes 12 months per year, even if your legislature isn’t in session for a majority of those months. A legislative intelligence tool like Plural can unlock insights and empower your work year-round. Plural helps ensure that your team can effectively advocate for change once session hits.

Top public policy teams trust Plural with their legislative monitoring and tracking, stakeholder engagement, and policy intelligence needs. With Plural, you’ll:

• Access superior public policy data 
• Be the first to know about new bills and changes in bill status
• Streamline your day with seamless organization features
• Harness the power of time-saving AI tools to gain insights into individual bills and the entire legislative landscape
• Keep everyone on the same page with internal collaboration and external reporting all in one place

Interested in getting started? Book a demo today!

More Resources for Public Policy Teams