7 Winning Strategies for State Government Affairs

For even the most seasoned political operatives and veterans of the state policy landscape, there are simply too many places to be and too much activity to keep track of. Whether you’re a manufacturing conglomerate with operations all across the country or a ride-sharing company looking to expand a new business model at the local level, you need eyes everywhere — and year-round — to help you make the most informed decisions. 

The most effective and efficient government and public affairs teams are using FiscalNote to modernize their operations across U.S. states and get the most comprehensive outlook on what is happening at both the legislative and regulatory levels of government. FiscalNote gives you visibility and insight into state and local governments and facilitates cross-enterprise collaboration around the public sector issues that impact your business, all in one centralized place.

1. State Legislative Tracking: Follow Legislation and Regulation and Never Miss a Bill or Rule

FiscalNote’s state legislative tracking solution allows you to receive timely and accurate information insights on state legislative and regulatory policies, issues, and stakeholders without the fear of missing any of the most critical information. Your team will be able to follow bills from inception to passage and rules from proposal to enactment allowing you to act early from the moment a key bill or rule is first discussed.

FiscalNote’s legislative tracking system provides you with comprehensive coverage throughout the entirety of a bill’s lifecycle. You’ll be able to monitor the newly introduced bills you care about with access to amendments, voting history, markups, committee documents, and more. More easily identify trends across the states via our bill comparison analysis which enables teams to take the most proactive approach on issues developing around the country.

Finding comprehensive state regulatory information from proposal to enactment can be challenging. In addition to FiscalNote’s legislative tracking, we also provide you with robust regulatory coverage throughout the entirety of the rule-making process. You’ll be able to monitor newly proposed rules you won’t want to miss with access to notices, executive orders, motions, and hearings. 

2. Launch Advocacy Campaigns With Just a Few Clicks

FiscalNote allows teams to seamlessly create a grassroots or grasstops advocacy campaign directly from a FiscalNote bill page. 

Advocacy campaigns can be one of the best ways to influence legislation at the state level. As more and more organizations are turning to their members to force action on the most important issues affecting them, teams cannot afford to miss out on launching their own campaigns. 

With FiscalNote, you’ll be able to save time by moving directly from a bill you’re working on to your advocacy tool with just a few clicks to launch a metrics-driven, engaging grassroots campaign at the state level. Add to that FiscalNote’s high rate of email deliverability and robust address matching system will ensure that campaigns are executed effectively.

3. Manage Your Stakeholders Across the Country

When your company operates across various states throughout the country, managing the execution of public issue strategies is complicated. Misalignment can cost the company brand trust, profits, and market share.

Modern government relations teams look to FiscalNote for industry-leading stakeholder management solutions to help map key stakeholders, track engagements with them throughout the country, and report out on that activity. FiscalNote enables decentralized teams to more effectively manage the individuals and organizations influencing their key policy issues — whether its elected officials, industry peers, or agency contacts — and proactively understand the stakeholder landscape across the states that affects their organization in a centralized dashboard. 

Teams can document their relationships and engagements with pre-populated contacts (including U.S. state legislators) and user-inputted, custom contacts to create cohesive stakeholder maps. Better understand which stakeholders are a part of your organizational network, how aligned they might be with your policy objectives, and any interactions your team might have had with them in the past — enabling you to draw from all of these insights to create the most effective engagement strategy moving forward. 

Relationships are at the root of a robust state government relations strategy, and with FiscalNote, you’ll be able to see them all at once. 

4. Create an Internal Center of Excellence

Every executive has grappled with the amount of information that is stored inside people’s heads. There are myriad anecdotes of the cost of knowledge that leaves an organization when key personnel move to different companies. 

Given the stakes in today’s complex political environment and the challenge of managing an effective state government strategy, no organization can afford not to maintain a record of the issues, players, and actions taken on an ongoing basis. 

By using one system of record to drive a public policy strategy, your organization can more effectively align disparate teams around messaging, goals, and responses.

The ability to communicate across FiscalNote enables all internal stakeholders to more efficiently address and respond to the challenges of today’s political environment. Save time by not having to duplicate work, drive collaboration by allowing colleagues to see your work in real-time, and accessing all relevant information — not just the data that FiscalNote provides — in one place.

5. Follow Your Online Footprint with Social Media Monitoring

As every government relations pro knows, all politics is local, and the issues that frequently become national news start on social media at the state and local levels of government. Whether it be a consumer safety issue or a social justice issue, following social media trends is one of the easiest ways for government relations teams to have a holistic view as to what is going on at all times.

Social media monitoring in the FiscalNote platform includes tweets from U.S. legislators, governors, and state executives (such as Lt. Governor, state Attorneys General, or Secretary of State), the President of the United States, and many more important figures that you need to stay connected to. Teams can search and find tweets based on content (i.e. COVID-19, wages and compensation, or minimum wage), and with FiscalNote’s intuitive filtering system, teams can find the tweets of 4000+ legislators that matter most to them while skipping all the white noise. 

6. Leverage a District Map to See Your Impact

You already know the value you bring to communities where you have assets, but do the elected officials in those districts understand?

FiscalNote’s District Mapping solution overlays your organization’s footprint around the country, with an easy to understand report that displays your impact with hard metrics. Visually demonstrate the value you bring state and congressional lawmakers’ in the constituencies where your offices, manufacturing plants, stores, or supply chain warehouses are. 

Getting in front of lawmakers can be challenging, but with FiscalNote’s District Map, you’ll be able to show state lawmakers your value to their constituencies, making it easier to educate them on your issues. Teams that use FiscalNote’s state solution can now demonstrate multiple data points to state and local lawmakers, including the number of jobs their organization provides, locations of their operations, the property tax paid, sales tax collected, payroll generated, and many more. 

7. Generate Clean, Appealing Reports for Stakeholders

There’s no way to measure ROI or establish accountability at the state level without effective reporting. 

One of the advantages of FiscalNote’s enterprise-wide system of record is the ability to pull reports on team activities and their impact, and then customize them as needed for different executives. Like all business functions, executives need a snapshot of the key drivers of their government strategies and responses. Data-driven reporting is just as important for assessing the impact of government, as it is for understanding sales and marketing results.

By understanding which actions were effective, which stakeholders were involved, and what the results looked like over time through FiscalNote’s reporting features, your team will have a repeatable process through which it can assess the value of all of its activity and responses, hold departments accountable for their results, and develop longer-term strategies.