Three Ways Susan G. Komen Drives Policy Change with FiscalNote

Susan G. Komen is the world’s leading breast cancer advocacy organization on a mission to end breast cancer across the globe. Taking a 360-degree approach to achieving this mission, Komen invests in research, community health programs, global outreach, and public policy initiatives to make the biggest impact against the disease and ensure people are getting the care they need. 

For Molly Guthrie, senior director of public policy and advocacy, driving policy changes across the U.S. to help Komen carry out its mission and achieve organizational goals is of the utmost importance. 

Driving Policy to Achieve Organizational Goals

“My team looks at federal, state, and local opportunities for policy change that will improve outcomes for breast cancer patients and survivors,” Guthrie explains. With an ever-growing number of issues to advocate for, Komen’s public policy and advocacy team prioritizes those that directly impact the communities they serve across the country. 

In the policy and advocacy space, it can be difficult to effectively measure the ROI of all the work to manage, influence, and act on legislation. But the Komen public policy and advocacy team can effectively measure and report on their work using FiscalNote. 

“We take individual measures to help meet organization-wide goals, such as watching the number of bills we’re engaging on, the number of states we’re engaging in, and the number of grassroots advocates that have been engaged,” says Guthrie.

Guthrie and her team rely on FiscalNote to meet their goals in many ways, but she specifically highlights three main takeaways: 

1. Proactive identification of legislative developments across the states

The sheer volume of policy moving across the states has increased and following the cradle-to-grave life cycle of a piece of policy can be challenging.  

“We were very much underwater before we had FiscalNote,” says Guthrie of her team’s workflows before adopting the platform. “Each state does things differently. We were setting up alerts or going into different state legislature sites and doing searches. It was a major burden to make sure we were capturing introduced bills and knowing when they were moving across the country.”

With FiscalNote, the entire process of monitoring policy developments across all 50 states is automated, centralized, and made actionable. Users are alerted of newly introduced policies, updated on developments, and can share key insights with relevant stakeholders 𑁋 from one, easy-to-use platform. 

For teams of all shapes and sizes, FiscalNote stands as a first line of defense for managing high volumes of policy developments. “When we were a small team, FiscalNote enabled us to keep our pulse on what was happening across the states. As we’ve grown, FiscalNote has allowed us to be more proactive rather than reactive. Now we immediately know when committee hearings are scheduled or when a bill drops that we hadn’t heard about,” Guthrie adds. 

2. Strategic, data-driven decision making

In addition to the value derived from automated, targeted policy tracking, FiscalNote has helped Komen’s public policy and advocacy team make strategic, informed decisions with its proprietary technology and analytics. 

“FiscalNote has a lot of tools that help with strategy and strategic decisions. For example, having insight into which legislators are likely to support or oppose legislation helps us understand who we should be targeting,” says Guthrie. “Also, understanding which bills are more likely to pass than others is really important, especially at the state level when you’re seeing tens of thousands of bills every session.”

Having these insights at their fingertips is a game-changer, especially when deciding how to best prioritize time, resources, and efforts across such an expansive set of issues and bills.

3. Coordinating efforts across a growing team 

Effective team-wide coordination and alignment are invaluable. To effectively collaborate and communicate on key issues, teams need to be equipped with up-to-date information on the latest legislative or regulatory developments, talking points, conversations with key stakeholders, and more. 

“Now that we’re a larger team, having one single source of truth that everyone uses is important,” says Guthrie. “In addition to monitoring policy developments, we’re able to track interactions so we all know about what conversations are happening. FiscalNote has become a one-stop-shop for us 𑁋 increasing transparency within our team and making it easier for us to share information without having to set up a phone call or exchanging emails.”

Getting hours back in the day with FiscalNote

Komen’s public policy and advocacy team works tirelessly on their priority issues to ensure policies that make meaningful impacts in communities across the U.S. are enacted. Having tools in place to help get this job done is imperative. 

“Without FiscalNote, I could not have a normal workday. I would be working endless hours and still wouldn’t have the level of insights and information that would be provided by the tool,” says Guthrie. “With FiscalNote, you magically get more hours in the day.”

Monitoring policy developments, tracking teamwide engagements, and reporting out on all the work being done on key issues is no small task, but FiscalNote makes it easier for teams around the world.