Most government affairs teams have a tracking tool. Most still build their reports by hand. That came through in a poll at the start of our webinar. Most attendees said their tracking lives in a tool. Their reports still get assembled manually.
So we asked Paul Ellender, Senior Product Manager for PolicyNote, to build a policy portfolio from zero. Then he used it to produce every report a GA team owes leadership. The session follows the four phases of our Policy to Value reporting framework: build the portfolio, stay aware of changes, brief leadership, and demonstrate impact. Nothing gets re-gathered along the way.
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Jump to a Topic
- 4:35 - Phase 1: Build the portfolio
- 10:27 - Phase 2: Stay ahead of changes
- 16:34 - Phase 3: Brief leadership
- 19:15 - Phase 4: Demonstrate impact
- 24:22 - Reporting through the PolicyNote MCP
- 29:12 - Q&A: What is MCP?
Phase 1: Build the Portfolio
Paul started with a new project for PFAS legislation across the states. His first tip was to write a few sentences in the project description about why the issue matters to the organization. PolicyNote reads that description and suggests the search query for the project's first alert. You can start tracking before you know the right keywords. A Boolean keyword search is available if you'd rather write your own.
From the results, he added bills to the project one at a time or in bulk with Add to Projects. As each bill goes in, you can set a priority, record a position, and apply custom tags. Customers use tags for product lines, internal codes, and handoffs, such as a "review" tag that one person checks on a schedule. Those labels are what make the later reports fast. When your boss asks for the highest-priority issues, you filter for them and pull the report.
Save as Alert turns the search into an ongoing feed for the project. A backfill date tells PolicyNote to pull in matches from the past month, so the alert has a starting point instead of an empty inbox.
Phase 2: Stay Ahead of Changes
The fear Anna raised is the one we hear most: a key amendment slips by and nobody knows until it's too late. Paul showed three ways PolicyNote covers it. Every saved policy generates email updates on movement, with frequency set in one central email preferences page. Each project also has a recent updates widget with status changes, and for federal bills, CQ news and transcripts tied to the policy.
The feature customers have been most enthusiastic about is the Summarize What's Happening Lately button. It reads your projects, recent legislative activity, and any actions you've logged, such as meetings with legislators. Then it writes a summary you can copy to your boss.
For the standing weekly brief, Paul built a report in the Report Builder covering only what changed in the last seven days across three projects. He kept the map and grouped the results by tag. He also turned on impact on your organization, a short summary per bill of how the policy affects you specifically. That's the block to hand over when someone asks how a bill actually matters to you.
Phase 3: Brief Leadership
A CEO doesn't want 80 bills. The Discover page filters narrow a portfolio of hundreds down to the few that belong in the meeting. High priority. Recently updated. Still in consideration, or past the second chamber. A newer filter surfaces prefiles for the upcoming term. The filtered set exports to CSV or goes straight into a report.
Every report has a direct link, an embed code, and a send-by-email option. Some customers embed their membership briefs on a members-only website. Reports can also be scheduled, with a cadence and a recipient list, so the weekly brief sends itself.
Phase 4: Demonstrate Impact
Paul's first recommendation was to review your organization profile in PolicyNote. The more context the platform has on your organization and issues, the better its AI Assistant writes impact summaries and other content. The assistant also stores memories from your chats automatically, so a detail like "we have 50 employees in Georgia" carries into future answers.
Impact reporting runs on actions. You can log them by adding PolicyNote's email address to a meeting invite, or by upload. You can also tell the AI Assistant: "I just met with Senator Cassidy about H.R. 7567, and he's on board." Reports on a bill now include the related actions by default, as a summary or a full list. "What have we done about H.R. 7567?" becomes a generated report with your meetings beside the legislative record.
Reporting Through the PolicyNote MCP
Paul closed by opening Claude with the PolicyNote MCP connected. He asked for an executive brief on H.R. 7567 and everything the team had done to pass it. The assistant pulled the bill and related stakeholders from PolicyNote and drafted the brief. The same works in Copilot or Gemini, and the output can be reformatted however leadership likes to read it.
Anna asked what changes when the assistant also has business data, such as product lines or finances. Paul's answer: the analysis stays grounded in real legislative data, and you can pair it with your own numbers. That could mean putting a dollar figure on the SKU a blocked bill would have affected. A general-purpose chatbot without that connection draws on whatever it scraped from the open web.
MCP, in Paul's words, is fancy developer speak for Model Context Protocol. It's the way your AI assistant talks to your PolicyNote account. Customers can ask their account manager or client success manager for a demo. Anyone can sample it on the PolicyNote MCP page, and it is available standalone.
Next Steps
Every report in this walkthrough came from one maintained portfolio. If your team still rebuilds the weekly brief or the year-end summary by hand, start here:
- Audit your workflow. Read the Policy to Value reporting framework and mark where your team still searches for updates or rebuilds reports from memory.
- Try the MCP. Sample the PolicyNote MCP with your own AI assistant to see what a grounded executive brief looks like.
- See it on your issues. Request a PolicyNote demo and we'll build the same workflow around the bills you track.