Legislata for Journalists
Here’s what Legislata is and how it can help you
“People have missed press conferences because they’re working and then later find the alert buried in their inbox.” - Journalist for nationally recognizable publication
Like social media, without the time wasted
Working in journalism can be spending your days just trying to keep up with everything that’s happening. You have your own work to do, but you also need to be aware of what’s happening in committee rooms, on the campaign trail, or among your colleagues (or competitors). Today, this is often accomplished by relentlessly checking Twitter or news websites. But that’s a lot of time that could be better spent elsewhere.
There are a number of ways which Legislata can help those in the press. Three that we want to highlight are:
Set up alerts for what matters to you
Assemble research seamlessly
Share your own work with an audience that cares
Set up alerts
One reason that Twitter has become the de facto newswire is that it’s where political conversations happen. But it’s not designed to deliver the news you need to know when you need to know it. It’s instead designed for the opposite, to keep you engaged and scrolling through more and more ads.
Legislata can serve some of the same functions as social media, by letting information be easily shared with those who wish to hear it. But we’re also built for professionals who need that information to be delivered quickly and efficiently.
To that end, we let you join offices (our term for groups or workspaces) serving political communities, from cities to states to issues, and set up notifications. When something is posted about what matters to you, you’ll receive a notification in the app and in an email. If you want to save even more time, you can have all your notifications summarized in a daily digest sent in the morning. One email you scan (from every office you’re a part of) and you have what matters to you from the previous 24 hours.
Assemble research seamlessly
Working in the political world can mean drowning in paper (or the digital equivalent). Getting everything you need for an article, report, or project can be a huge hassle, especially if you’ve delegated some tasks to your team. Having interns compile press clippings every morning may save you time upfront, but now you’ve got emails or Word documents to search through whenever you need to find something.
Luckily, Legislata lets you keep and share notes and anything else you need to remember. Even better, everything can be associated with the legislation, issue, category, person, or organization it relates to. No more searching through a dozen folders to find the agenda from the meeting about potholes your colleague attended. A quick filter for “potholes” in your Legislata office and there you have it.
You can also delegate tasks in Legislata, so that your team can see the status of each element of the project. If you’re putting together a major report on an issue, track the status of each chapter, interview, and draft without having to go to another app.
Become an informational and thought leader
Legislata also helps you share and collaborate with others - including staying up to date with what’s happening in your networks and letting others know what you think.
Join offices about your political networks, from geography to issue-based, and upload your articles. You can tag them with what they relate to and others will receive notifications. No more seeing one of your pieces published and hope the right audience reads it. Upload it, tag it with what it relates to, and people who have set up notifications on those topics get an alert instantaneously.
You can also go one step further, and create your own office that others can subscribe to. You’ll have a space to share and discuss news that less noisy than social media and more targeted than newsletters. This could be a place where you post your articles or you can take advantage of the tagging, notifying, and database features of Legislata to create something entirely new. Be the curator of civic information or manage lists that would otherwise be unwieldy. For example, if it’s always been a nightmare to find all the major ESG regulators across different jurisdictions and the notices they issue, then create an office called “ESG notices” and post them there. If you’re receiving press releases constantly and think that others would like them in a consistent format, set up a press release repository. The ability to set up paywalls to be paid for the information you have is in development.
How to sign up?
If you want to get started right away, you can go to app.legislata.com and create an account (currently, it is optimized for desktop, so mobile will look odd). You can also request to join offices sharing information about different geographies, or create your own and invite others to follow you.
It’s free to join and you can select Team or Pro in the Office page to start your free four-week trial of those premium tiers.
Additional tidbits
A full user guide is available here.
A tutorial video series is here.
You can check out our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy (and Privacy Policy for California) and our FAQs to learn more about it.
You can request a personal demonstration here.