Building a Better Policy Management Solution: Behind the Scenes with PolicyNote Developers

Addressing Real-World Pain Points

Developing PolicyNote was intensely customer-focused, explains Jennifer Duran, PolicyNote’s director of product management. “We spent a lot of time speaking to different players in the industry and our customers, who are government affairs professionals in organizations of all sizes,” she says. 

Time Savings

A consistent thread emerged: too much time was spent sifting through an ocean of legislative alerts and updates, leaving less time for action and influence. Policy professionals expressed a need for quick, accurate information synthesis that could help prioritize issues and streamline communication with stakeholders.

More Time for Meaningful Work

Another challenge that surfaced was finding the time for the face-to-face aspects at the heart of government affairs. “Government relations is largely centered around communicating, educating, and influencing stakeholders,” Duran says. “To do that, you can't be reading regulatory and legislative alerts. You’ve got to get out from behind the screens and do the work. That's really more about communicating and collaborating, not so much reading legislation and regulation.”

Our goal was clear: reduce the friction in traditional policy management, provide instantaneous insights, and enable you to spend more time on strategy and advocacy rather than data collection and interpretation.

This is where PolicyNote shines. “The AI capabilities in PolicyNote help you do more of the work you want to do in a faster amount of time,” says Fallon Farmer, principal data scientist for PolicyNote. “It allows government affairs, legal and compliance teams to spend less time researching and finding and synthesizing information, so you can spend time tailoring that information to your business strategy and planning what you’re going to do next.” 

Prove Value

PolicyNote can also help government affairs teams prove your value within your organization, which is often a challenge. 

“Historically, policy professionals in the corporate world have been seen as cost centers,” Babaoglu says. “Our long-term vision is to help you prove you’re a value creator, not just a cost center. This will help businesses understand that government affairs is not just a defensive game, but a way to identify opportunities and create value as well.”

How We Brought This Vision to Life

Our approach to developing PolicyNote was rooted in a commitment to innovation, user-centric design, and advanced AI capabilities. By embedding AI throughout PolicyNote, we’ve empowered you to search, synthesize, and prioritize legislative documents with unprecedented efficiency. 

Data accuracy and trust are top priorities for government affairs teams when using any tool. That’s why PolicyNote's DNA emphasizes accuracy. We have a dedicated team of data engineers who deploy advanced automated web-scraping tools to monitor the latest legislation and regulation updates from trusted government sources. All the generative AI work in PolicyNote is grounded in the data we provide from trusted sources, and our team continuously evaluates the AI's prompts and responses for accuracy. 

“The AI is always using the latest and greatest information, which is not always available to foundational generative AI models,” Farmer explains. 

We have monitoring and evaluation tooling in place to assess the accuracy of the information the AI provides so we can continuously improve. There are also guardrails in place to make sure that no personal information that you input into the AI tool can be singled out or accessed. Plus, since the AI Assistant isn’t connected to the internet, your data stays secure and private.

PolicyNote is designed to ensure that you are no longer inundated with irrelevant information. With customizable dashboards and dynamic updates, you see only what’s most important to your role. This allows you to manage policy changes effectively and ensure that nothing crucial is overlooked.

Customer-Centric Development

From inception to execution, customer feedback has been at the heart of PolicyNote’s development. Our development process involved continuous dialogue with users to fine-tune features and eliminate bottlenecks. For instance, we revised our reporting module to ensure it delivered tailored insights in a user-friendly format, following your feedback on ease of use and information presentation.

By listening intently to your experiences and challenges, PolicyNote has evolved into a refined tool that consistently meets and exceeds your expectations. This iterative approach ensures that the platform remains agile and evolves with your needs.

Babaoglu adds that PolicyNote will continue to expand as the team “learns from your experiences and reacts with urgency to improve them.”

Key Features That Innovate

AI-Powered Insights 

One of PolicyNote’s standout elements is its AI-powered insights which include providing AI-generated policy summaries, drafting communications, letting you ask contextualized follow-up questions, and more. You can instantly grasp the essentials of lengthy policy documents, with context on how they relate to your specific business concerns, accelerating decision-making processes. Additionally, its integrated platform combines AI chat assistance and advanced search functions, making navigation through complex policy landscapes intuitive and time-efficient.

During busy periods, such as state sessions, many teams receive an unmanageable number of alerts. They must review policies and make quick decisions about whether to prioritize them. PolicyNote cuts the process down to minutes. AI summaries give you an instant peek into the legislation's content, allowing you to quickly understand the bill and decide whether to take action. 

Beyond answering questions and making searching easy, PolicyNote is transforming how users prepare for briefings, gather talking points, and compare and summarize information. Once you deem an issue a priority, the AI assistant helps generate starting points for documents, summaries, statements, and emails in seconds that would otherwise take hours to write. 

Natural Language Search

You can query policies using natural language, accessing tailored insights that are directly relevant to your unique context. This simplifies the process and makes it easier than figuring out how to use Boolean terms and connectors, or even keyword searches. 

“You don’t have to be an expert in research to find what’s important to you,” Duran says. “We have a chat-style, plain English search capability that is AI-assisted.” For example, you could simply type, “Tell me about policies in Arizona that cover PFAS,” and get your desired results, as well as a summary to provide an immediate picture of the landscape. You can further refine your search from there, all in the chat, and ask questions of the AI assistant to provide more context. 

“With the generative AI experience throughout PolicyNote, the answers are tailored to the individual,” Farmer says.  “Based on what you’re asking, you can get specific answers related to portions of policy you care about. It helps explain why it's relevant to your business. You can dive deeper and ask continuous questions that are more tailored to your point of view and what you need to know.”

Customizable Dashboard

The development of PolicyNote was centered on the ability to immediately focus on critical policy and prioritize activities. This is why a user-friendly dashboard that shows all your important information at a glance greets you when you start your day on the platform. The dashboard is configurable, so the information that is most important to you is at your fingertips, and it is automatically updated throughout the day. 

“If certain issue areas are important to you, you have the ability to put those front and center,” Duran explains. “You can see on a map where the policies you care about are popping up, and quickly see what hearings are coming up for the issues you’re following. The dashboard brings the information to you versus you having to go find it in the product.” 

Looking Forward

PolicyNote is more than just a tool; it’s a partner in policy management. It effectively cuts through legislative chaos, providing a comprehensive platform where all relevant data converges. As we continue to improve PolicyNote based on your feedback, the goal remains to empower everyone in government relations, public affairs, and advocacy roles to demonstrate your strategic value within your organization while redefining how policy influence is achieved.

“We are uniquely positioned to be the only company to provide all four of the things government affairs professionals need to do your jobs well: public data, proprietary data, advanced technology, and human intelligence,” Babaoglu says. “That’s our advantage when competing with other players in the market — no one else has all four.” 

PolicyNote offers intelligent governmental insights that drive meaningful action. Let PolicyNote do the heavy lifting so you can elevate your influence where it counts.