Advocacy Organization

Your organization monitors Kansas legislation to protect your members' interests, advocate for policy changes, or inform your community. You need to track bills across multiple policy areas, keep stakeholders informed, and mobilize action when critical legislation moves. BillBee helps your team stay coordinated and your members stay engaged.

This guide covers workflows for organizational legislative monitoring — from setting up your tracking system to producing stakeholder reports and mobilizing members.

Setting Up Your Legislative Monitoring Program

Define Your Policy Priorities

Before diving into BillBee, align your team on the policy areas your organization cares about. Most organizations focus on 3-5 core areas. For example:

• An education association might track: school funding, teacher certification, curriculum standards, school safety, higher education
• A business group might track: taxation, regulation, workforce development, infrastructure, economic development
• A healthcare nonprofit might track: Medicaid, mental health, insurance access, public health, healthcare workforce

Create Saved Searches for Each Priority

Set up Saved Searches for each policy area. Create multiple searches per area to catch bills that use different terminology:

Example: A workforce development organization:

• "job training workforce development"
• "unemployment insurance benefits"
• "apprenticeship vocational education"
• "minimum wage worker compensation"
• "employee rights workplace safety"

On the Professional plan, you get unlimited saved searches with instant new-bill alerts — so your team knows about relevant bills the day they're filed.

Track Key Committees

Track committees relevant to your priorities across both chambers. Remember that Kansas has parallel committees in the House and Senate — legislation on the same topic may be heard in either.

Daily Monitoring Workflow

Morning Review

Start each day during session with a quick review:

1. Check email notifications — Review any instant alerts or the daily digest for overnight activity
2. Review the Calendar — See which committees are meeting today and what's on the agenda
3. Check tracked bills — Look for status changes, new amendments, or scheduled hearings

Triage New Bills

When your saved searches surface new bills:

1. Read the AI Short Summary to quickly assess relevance
2. Check the BeeScore — High-impact bills (66-100) deserve immediate attention
3. Decide: track, watch, or skip — Add important bills to your tracking list; note borderline bills for later review

Use BeeScore to Prioritize

During a busy session, dozens of bills may touch your policy areas. BeeScore helps you focus your limited staff time on the bills most likely to have real impact. A bill scored 85 deserves more attention than one scored 20, even if both are technically relevant.

Weekly Summary

At the end of each week, review the status of all tracked bills:

• Which bills advanced? Which stalled?
• Are any hearings coming up next week?
• Do any bills need your organization's public position (support, oppose, neutral)?

Communicating With Members and Stakeholders

Sharing Bills and Updates

Use BillBee's sharing features to keep members informed:

• Share cards — Generate visual bill summaries for social media posts and newsletters. Choose from four styles (Minimal, Bold, Editorial, Gradient) and two sizes (Story, Post).
• Social media templates — Pre-formatted posts for Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Bluesky to quickly get the word out about important bills.
• Direct links — Share BillBee bill links in emails and messaging so members can read details themselves.

Building Legislative Reports

On the Professional plan, generate formatted reports for your board, members, or coalition partners:

• Executive Summary — A quick overview for board members or busy stakeholders
• Detailed Analysis — In-depth review for policy committee members
• Stakeholder Report — Impact-focused report for affected members
• Legislative Update — Status report covering multiple bills for regular distribution

Reports can be exported as PDF, Word, or HTML.

Legislative Scorecards

Use Voting Records to build legislative scorecards for your organization:

1. Identify key votes — Select the floor votes most relevant to your mission
2. Review each legislator's voting record — Track Yea, Nay, Present, and Absent votes
3. Analyze party-line patterns — See which legislators break from their party on your issues
4. Export data (Professional plan) — Download voting data as CSV for your own scoring spreadsheet or report

On the Professional plan, vote comparison tools let you compare how different legislators voted on the same bills — useful for identifying champions and opponents.

Mobilizing Action

When a critical bill gets a hearing or floor vote, your members need to know — and they need to know what to do.

Alert Your Members

Configure notifications to give you maximum lead time:

• Hearing scheduled — Instant alerts give you time to mobilize testimony
• Floor vote scheduled — Alert members to contact their legislators
• Status changes — Track when bills advance to new stages

Prepare Action Items

When a hearing is coming up:

1. Read the Full AI Summary to understand the bill completely
2. Review the committee members using Legislator Profiles — Know who's on the committee and how they've voted on similar issues
3. Coordinate testimony — Decide whether your organization will testify as proponent, opponent, or neutral, and prepare talking points
4. Brief your members — Share the bill link, your position, and suggested talking points so members can also testify or submit written comments

Types of Testimony

Kansas legislative committees accept testimony from organizations and individuals as proponents, opponents, or neutral parties. Testimony can be delivered in person at the Capitol, remotely (when available), or as written-only submissions. See Hearings for more details.

Track Legislator Positions

Use Legislator Profiles and Voting Records to track which legislators support your issues:

• Sponsors and co-sponsors — Legislators who introduced bills aligned with your goals are potential allies
• Committee votes — How committee members voted on your priority bills
• Floor votes — The definitive record of where each legislator stands

Campaign Finance Research

Use the Campaign Finance tools to understand the financial landscape around your issues:

• Donor Search — Find which organizations and individuals are contributing to legislators on key committees
• Research contributions to understand funding patterns relevant to your policy areas

Data Use Restrictions

Kansas law (K.S.A. 25-4148) prohibits selling campaign finance data. Use this information for research and advocacy purposes only.

Recommended Plan

Organizations doing active legislative monitoring should use the Professional plan ($49/month). Unlimited bill and committee tracking, instant new-bill alerts, report generation, and data export are critical for organizational workflows. See Subscription Tiers for the full comparison.

For organizations just getting started or with a narrow policy focus, the Citizen plan ($12/month) covers the basics with 10 bills, 10 committees, and 10 saved searches.

Quick Reference

Task	Where in BillBee
Set up monitoring	Saved Searches
Track committees	Committees
Triage new bills	BeeScore
Read bill summaries	AI Summaries
Share with members	Sharing Bills
Generate reports	Bill Analysis (Professional)
Build scorecards	Voting Records
Research donors	Campaign Finance
Prepare for hearings	Hearings
Check session deadlines	Session Schedule