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How to Build a Legislative Scorecard
Legislative scorecards provide easy to interpret overviews of what new legislation is proposed and how legislators are voting. They’re primarily used by advocacy groups to rank legislators according to their voting record on specific issues. Scores are usually shown as vote index, total points, or letter grades and help the public easily understand how legislators are voting. Likewise, representatives regularly visit scorecards to get indicators of how the public feels about specific issues.
See How to Easily Build a Legislative Scorecard and Impact Legislation®
Choose the Bills
Decide within your organization what types of bills you think would be most effective to target. Most organizations advocate for specific issues. So running a search for all bills containing those issues is a good start. We recommend using the BillTrack50 bill search tool to search for bills by issue, keyword, or bill number. Import those bills into one Bill Sheet and curate them to just the bills you want to focus on. BillTrack50 also has Stakeholder Pages which is a good feature to discuss and curate bills internally.
Design Your Formula
Now that you have a list of bills, decide what your position is on each bill and rate them according to your scoring formula. A common scoring formula that is easy to understand for the public is: +1 point for each good bill, -1 point for each bad bill, 0 for bills you’re neutral on or monitoring.
Of course, scoring formulas can also be more complex and can include points for Sponsorships, weighted scoring on bills, considerations for absent votes and more. We can help answer any questions you have about common scoring formulas.
Launch and Share
As part of our Legislative Scorecard service, we take care of designing and setting up the scorecard on your website for you. Our designer will send a custom design for how the scorecard will look on your website. Once approved, we will take care of integrating it into your website. We also handle annual changes, like updating legislator headshots, contact information and our Find Your Legislator by Address feature.
While we’re focused on the design and setup, you can plan your communications strategy for how you’d like to share your scorecard. Most organizations consider social media, website alerts, newsletters, direct emails to legislators, and paid advertisements in this strategy.
“The plugin integrates beautifully with our WordPress site. It is easy to look up votes, specify our position, and generate the scores.
The team at Revive was very responsive to our specific needs when creating our scorecard. They are constantly very responsive and on top of all of our requests. We greatly enjoy working with them and their great service!”
National Parks Action Fund
See how the National Parks Action Fund worked with us to build their legislative scorecard and immediately extend their Facebook reach by 92K+ interactions.