Bills Tutorial
The bills page shows you the bills that are pending in your primary network. Note, for the purposes of Legislata, “bills” can also be used for regulations, orders, and any other policies that require your attention.
Create Bills
You can add bills to the database through a simple form. Click the Create New Bill button and fill out the fields. You can also later edit the information in a bill if things change (such as new co-sponsors joining the bill or the number assigned to it changes).
Attachments on bills
Encouraging a council or legislature to vote in favor of a bill can be difficult on political terms but it can also be a headache purely from a logistical point of view. Emails to your colleagues can get buried in inbox, press releases might not get picked up in the paper, and literature from advocacy organizations stack up on your desks.
With Legislata, each of those supporting pieces of information can be attached to the bill page, so that everyone has easy access to it in the future.
Everyone in that network can add attachments to bills. If you think that your colleagues are clogging up a bill page with non-germane attachments, you can send a complaint to chris@legislata.com, but since all attachments are listed with the office that uploaded them, we hope this is not a problem.
Marking bills as reviewed
Many legislatures have to review thousands of bills each session. This can be difficult to track what your staff has and hasn’t looked at.
By clicking the Mark Reviewed button next to a bill on the main bills page, you can let the rest of your office know that you’ve looked at this bill and made your decision.
These reviews are private to your office, so no one else will know if you’ve considered a bill or not.
Note for Massachusetts State House users
Bills in the current session of the Massachusetts State Legislature will be automatically uploaded to Legislata. These will be updated weekly from malegislature.gov.
These automatic updates will not include any supplementary information or attachments for the bills. If you wish to include those, please upload them yourself or email them to chris@legislata.com to be included on those bill pages.