Partnering with FiscalNote’s professional services team, FSI was able to consolidate all those resources into a manageable experience that stays updated throughout the year and shows, in a transparent way, where their efforts are going.
“We want to provide our members transparency into what we're doing but we also don't want to bury them in the details,” Bellaire says. “Our members don't have the time to dig into the 27 bills introduced today that might impact their business when many have little chance of being adopted. So we use the FiscalNote policy map as a place on our website that people can go to see what's happening in their state, and what it is that we're working on.”
Tying In Grassroots Advocacy
Using FiscalNote for the last three years has allowed Bellaire’s team to be more proactive in managing their issues as well as reporting to their stakeholders. As part of this strategy, FSI has brought in FiscalNote’s flagship advocacy solution VoterVoice to better leverage their members and strengthen their grassroots advocacy strategy. Not only does VoterVoice allow advocates to quickly take action and connect with their lawmakers to push for an issue, but also it provides a lot of insights when it comes to member engagement.
“We never really had a means by which we could identify the issues that particular members were interested in,” Bellaire says. “[VoterVoice offers] a way of getting our message to the policymakers, but as important to us is that we can see which of our members raised their hand to say, ‘This is an issue I'm interested in,’” he says. “Our members feel more of a connection to what we're doing and we can mobilize them more effectively.”
Additionally, VoterVoice connects directly with FSI’s back-office system, Microsoft Dynamics, providing a useful bridge. “[VoterVoice] always knows who our current members are, and we always know who took action on what — that's very valuable to us,” Bellaire says.
For 2021, FSI is using VoterVoice to build scorecards on legislators as well. This will provide FSI’s team with hard data to inform their advocacy activities.
Reporting Made Easy
Proving the value of government affairs work starts well before writing a word of a report or presentation. Maintaining the issue pages in FiscalNote is not only part of the workflow for FSI’s team, but also they are a vital tool for reporting on their work to the rest of the organization.
“We have six board meetings a year. In the past, we would have to write a summary of all the issues, now we're building the summary day to day, week to week throughout the process [in FiscalNote]. Every day we're updating the issue pages, the actions, and so on so that when we need a report we're ready,” adds Bellaire.
“FiscalNote offers the broadest array of tools presented in the most logical way,” he says. “And we just continue to gain more and more value as we've continued to use it.”
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