Lobbyist-in-a-Box provides users with "profiles" for tracking and reporting legislation. This application is maintained through the 'full-screen' LIS web site. Although this help text is aimed at full-screen users, you may find it helpful for navigating in "PDA" mode.
Free Service:
You may track up to 5 bills in one Lobbyist-in-a-Box
"profile" without charge. To register you'll need to fill in your desired user
ID and password, your first and last name, and your email address.
Click on
Free registration to sign up.
Fee-based Registration:
A subscription to Lobbyist-in-a-Box offers the ability to create multiple
profiles, each containing bill lists and notification options. Email notification triggers an email when bills are sponsored by a member of the General Assembly, referred to a House
or Senate Committee or contain specific key word(s), phrases,
or Code section(s). The cost of this service is $400 for state agencies and $600 for all other
subscribers.
To subscribe, please take a look at the
subscription fee agreement.
Creating profiles:
If you are primarily
interested in being notifed of legislative events, and have little interest in maintaining a
bill list, choose email notification only. You'll always have the option of adding
bills to this profile at a later date.
If you know bill
tracking will be a part of your profile, choose bill
tracking and email notification. Regardless of which type of profile
you begin with, you have the option of minimizing or maximizing
to include or exclude either view.
When your profile is created it uses a default name ("MyProfile") and description,
containing the date and time of creation. You may change the name and description (recommended)
by clicking on properties from your profile view.
Managing profiles:
You add bills or resolutions to your profile by keying in bill numbers.
Bills are added one at a time or in groups. Groups
are added by keying bills into the entry form with a comma (or a space) between each.
For example: hb1, hb9, sb4, sb9. To delete a bill (or bills) from a list, select the adjacent check boxes and click
delete selected items.
You may also enter bills by viewing:
legislation sponsored by Members, referred to House or Senate
Committees, or introduced on a specific day. Additionally, you may search for key word(s), phrases, or Code Sections.
When you view each list, select the bill(s) you want to include in your profile.
To delete a profile, select the adjacent box and click remove checked items.
Be cautious!... once you click the button, it's gone. Use the same procedure for removing
bills, members, committees, etc. from your profile(s).
To copy a profile, click on properties and then key in the new profile name and description.
You may choose to receive Email Notification for each profile. You can be notified when a member of the
General Assembly sponsors legislation; when bills are referred to House and Senate Committees, and when
key word(s), phrases, or Code Sections appear in newly offered legislation.
Our system can also notify you when any of your bills has had
a status change.... ("updated by status change"). Click on
updated to enable status change alerts.
The alert process runs hourly or daily. Click on properties
to review your options. Question marks (???) next to your list description are an
indication that you are configured for notification but have not provided an email address.
Once a profile is created you can select composite view showing bill number, patron, committee and last action.
By pressing the view link you can toggle between a view with or without your notes.
In addition to the composite view,you'll also be able to create a report (an HTML-formatted file) showing bill number, patron, bill
title, summary,etc; or a CSV (comma-separated values) file, suitable for spreadsheet and database programs.
Using the check boxes, select those items you wish to include in your report.
You can use from / thru fields to filter your list. These are optional fields. If
you leave both fields blank, the system will assume all bill numbers within the selected
category. As an example: if you are viewing All legislation but only want to include
hb10 through hb20 in your output, enter those bill numbers in their respective fields.
If you leave the thru bill number blank, the system will assume you want 'thru' the last
bill number within the selected category. Another example: If you want just house bills, you can
enter from: hb1 thru: hb9999. Be sure to enter bill numbers in the correct format
(ie. hb1, sr6, sj245) with no intervening blanks and a maximum of 4 digits.
You can further filter your list by specifying an activity date
("Select bills with activity since or on: mm-dd"). Select one of the
radio buttons and use month-day format for the date. For example January 8th would
be entered as 01-08. Leave the field blank (or with its default prompt: mm-dd) to include
all qualifying bills. If you choose since, "activity" refers to those bills with history
action dates equal to and greater than the date specified. If you choose on,
then the bills selected must at least have history action dates equal to the date specified.
If you include an email address the report will be prepared offline and emailed to you,
usually within 15 minutes (depending on system load). If you omit your address the
report will be prepared and displayed online.
Please note: response times depend on items selected and number
of bills in the list. Online responses are limited to a document size of approximately
80K. Email responses are limited to 250K (approximately 100 pages). You may find it convenient
to use bill number ranges (described above) to manage output size. Be aware that text elements
(titles, summaries, amendments, votes) require additional resources and therefore take longer
to prepare.
I know a legislative event has occured, which should have triggered an email alert... yet I
never received it?
Some organizations, including a few state agencies, have chosen to block emails in an
attempt to prevent viruses. Check with your email administrator to make sure your alert
is not being held via email security protocols. Also.. check your "spam" preferences.
It's possible that our emails are being diverted, or blacklisted.
I received an email, supposedly containing an html attachment, but the attachment is
not there?
Similar answer... some organizations, including a few state agencies, have chosen to block html
attachments in an attempt to prevent viruses. Unfortunately, many of these organizations
run software that cannot determine if the attachment contains "live" code, or if the sender is
"trusted" versus "unknown"... and therefore, block all html attachments. Contact your email
administrator for more information. This is not an issue with commercial ISPs, such as AOL,
Earthlink, etc... where you define "acceptable" attachments, rather than the email
administrator.
I seem to have lost some bills from 1 or more of my profiles... What's going on?
Your profiles endure across sessions, however prior year bills contained in those profiles
are only retained for the purpose of tracking continued legislation. This is legislation
carried over from an even year (long session), to an odd year (short session).
Please call our help desk if you have any questions.
I received an email alert. When I went to look at the list of bills with changes,
there were no bills listed?
This can happen for 2 reasons. If your email alert is more than 3 days old, the changes
are considered "stale" and may have rolled off the change log. Also.. if you remove or modify your notification
configuration or you change notification to "don't" or "disable" after the email alert
is generated, nothing will show up. You can always set your configuration back if you want
to see the alert result.
I received an email alert, but when I went to look at the bills that supposedly had a
status change, I could not detect any changes. Why?
While we do our best to accurately detect changes, the data capture process can become quite volatile
during session. It is sometimes possible for changes to occur and then be quickly reversed.
The system will detect the change, but because of various circumstances, may not detect the
change reversal. Also, occasionally changes are made to a bill... to correct an error, or
change a committee referral...
which may not be reflected in the history date, but which do trigger an alert event.
If the email alert process runs hourly, why do I see "from/through" times that
do not reflect the "top of the hour" or exceed a span of 1 hour (or even a day!)?
The process does run hourly. Lets look at an example....
say the process runs at 10:00, but the last change took place at 09:30. Your "through" time
would be stated as 09:30 in this case. Let's further say that the process that ran at 09:00
captured its last change at 08:15. In this case, your "from/through" times for an alert issued
from the 10:00 process would be stated as "between 08:15 and 09:30".
Creating Reports:
Comma-separated values files:
Comma-separated values files csv (also known as comma-delimited files) are suitable for
spreadsheet or database input. Select those elements you are interested in as described in
the 'reports' section.