Skip to main content

New: Quorum and Axios Partnership — Bring the hyper-relevant industry news from Axios Pro into your legislative tracking workflow.

Learn More
WP_Query Object ( [query] => Array ( [name] => adeq-eliminated-manual-legislative-data-entry [post_type] => resources [resource-type] => case-studies ) [query_vars] => Array ( [name] => adeq-eliminated-manual-legislative-data-entry [post_type] => resources [resource-type] => case-studies [error] => [m] => [p] => 0 [post_parent] => [subpost] => [subpost_id] => [attachment] => [attachment_id] => 0 [pagename] => [page_id] => 0 [second] => [minute] => [hour] => [day] => 0 [monthnum] => 0 [year] => 0 [w] => 0 [category_name] => [tag] => [cat] => [tag_id] => [author] => [author_name] => [feed] => [tb] => [paged] => 0 [meta_key] => [meta_value] => [preview] => [s] => [sentence] => [title] => [fields] => [menu_order] => [embed] => [category__in] => Array ( ) [category__not_in] => Array ( ) [category__and] => Array ( ) [post__in] => Array ( ) [post__not_in] => Array ( ) [post_name__in] => Array ( ) [tag__in] => Array ( ) [tag__not_in] => Array ( ) [tag__and] => Array ( ) [tag_slug__in] => Array ( ) [tag_slug__and] => Array ( ) [post_parent__in] => Array ( ) [post_parent__not_in] => Array ( ) [author__in] => Array ( ) [author__not_in] => Array ( ) [search_columns] => Array ( ) [ignore_sticky_posts] => [suppress_filters] => [cache_results] => 1 [update_post_term_cache] => 1 [update_menu_item_cache] => [lazy_load_term_meta] => 1 [update_post_meta_cache] => 1 [posts_per_page] => 10 [nopaging] => [comments_per_page] => 50 [no_found_rows] => [order] => DESC ) [tax_query] => [meta_query] => WP_Meta_Query Object ( [queries] => Array ( ) [relation] => [meta_table] => [meta_id_column] => [primary_table] => [primary_id_column] => [table_aliases:protected] => Array ( ) [clauses:protected] => Array ( ) [has_or_relation:protected] => ) [date_query] => [queried_object] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 6841 [post_author] => 12 [post_date] => 2022-05-24 17:37:43 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-05-24 17:37:43 [post_content] =>

Challenge: Over 1600 Proposed Bills Per Arizona State Session to Sift Through and Only So Many Hours in the Day

The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) is the Arizona government agency administering the state’s environmental laws and delegated federal programs to prevent air, water, and land pollution, and ensure cleanup. The ADEQ legislative affairs team promotes the interests of the agency to the state legislature through meetings with legislators, public committee testimony and communications with the regulatory community. ADEQ’s legislative affairs team depends on legislative analyst Roxanne Linsley’s ability to identify and elevate state bills that could impact the department. To keep the legislative affairs team in the loop, Roxanne hosts a weekly huddle with Executive Leadership where she brings new bills the department is running or that might affect the department to discuss and determine which bills to prioritize in the legislative affairs strategy, as well as review the status bills the leadership team agreed to track. Before Quorum, each time a bill dropped that was relevant to ADEQ, Linsley had to manually enter data into her tracking spreadsheet. For each bill, she entered: the bill number, bill sponsors, the date the bill was proposed, link to the bill text, list of co-sponsors, bill summary, and where the bill was in the legislative process. This manual process was time-consuming and inefficient, leaving her with less time to conduct important analysis of the bills. “I used to have to skim and find the bills and amendments as they were dropping,” Linsley said. “It was a huge amount of time, especially in January and February, at about 50/60 hours a week.”

Solution: Use Quorum’s Customizable Bill Tracking to Suit Your Legislative Analysis Needs

Linsley created sheets in Quorum to track ADEQ bills and set up custom fields within each bill to replace her former manual data entry process. “I really focused on using Quorum for bill tracking and presenting to the leadership team when we meet — here's where the bills are and here's what is happening with the ones we're most interested in,” said Linsley. Here’s how Linsley uses Quorum in her bill tracking workflow:

Set Keyword Alerts to Automatically Find All Relevant Bills

1,679 bills dropped at the beginning of the 2022 state session. Linsley set up keyword alerts in Quorum that automatically notify her when a new bill containing a keyword —such as water quality fees— is proposed, and each time it moves to a new stage in the legislative process. When a new bill containing a keyword is introduced, it is added to a tracking spreadsheet in Quorum. Sheets, Quorum’s integrated spreadsheet tool, are organized much like manual spreadsheets, but auto-update with the most current legislative data of the bills Linsley is tracking instead of requiring manual updates each time something happens to a bill. Linsley’s Quorum Sheet automatically collects information on the bill number, bill sponsors, the date it was proposed, and a link to the bill text. Linsley then adds the bill to her huddle agenda and includes the information from Quorum about the bill in an email to her team so they can review the bill prior to the meeting.

Categorize Bills with Quorum’s Custom Fields

After bills are added to Linsley’s tracking sheets, she brings them to her weekly huddle with the leadership team. During the huddle, Linsley runs each bill through a series of questions her team answers and enters their responses into the custom fields she set up in each bill’s profile. Each custom field helps the team stay organized on what stance they decided on a bill, how actively they chose to watch the bill and keeps them on track with action items assigned to team members, like scheduling meetings with legislators. These fields are also used to provide data for the various metrics the team uses to evaluate performance. Each bill has the following custom fields within its profile the team populates during huddle: ● Track Status: TBD, track and engage, track but don’t engage, check at the end of session, don’t track ● Stance: support, oppose, neutral ● Fiscal Notes ● Discussion Notes ● Is this an ADEQ Bill? ● What ADEQ Divisions (air, water, waste, mission partners, etc.) are impacted by this bill? ● When was this bill sent to the leadership team for review? ● ADEQ to Implement? The weekly huddles keep Linsley’s team aligned on which bills to prioritize in their legislative affairs strategy.

Log Interactions to Closely Track Speed and Satisfaction of Legislative Interactions

Linsley also uses Quorum to analyze the quality of her team’s interactions with lawmakers. She treats each inquiry from legislators on ADEQ legislative matters as customer service requests in Quorum. After a team member meets with a legislator to answer their policy questions, the team member fills out Quorum’s interaction logger with ADEQ’s custom fields. The interaction logger helps Linsley gauge the speed of their team’s response time and the satisfaction from legislators with their response. For each interaction, ADEQ team members answer questions about the interaction topic, attendees, status, urgency, and satisfaction with their department’s response. Gathering this information helps Linsley analyze how effective ADEQ is at resolving these requests for information and how quickly they are sharing information legislators need to make their policy decisions.

Gather Metrics For Easy End of Session Legislative Analysis

In the months before a state session begins, ADEQ submits its legislative ideas to the Governor’s office to get approval for their team to pursue legislation in the next state session. Once in session, Linsley keeps track of how many of the department’s bills are passed by the legislature. By housing legislative data in Quorum, Linsley can more easily perform legislative analysis at the end of the state session. This report evaluates her team’s effectiveness in getting ADEQ ideas into legislation from the approval process through the actual state session itself. [callout align="right" heading="Learn the Steps for Proving the ROI of Your Legislative Affairs Team" button_text="Read the Blog" button_link="https://www.quorum.us/blog/agency-legislative-affairs-prove-roi/"] The metrics in Linsley’s report on ADEQ’s legislative affairs performance will include: ● Percent of legislative proposals that are approved by the Governor’s office ● Percent of department submittal items included in the Governor’s budget ● Percent of bills opposed by ADEQ that are mitigated due to ADEQ action ● Number of times a legislator or staffer calls back before an action item is closed ● Number of calls/callbacks from a legislator or staffer requesting clarification For each of these metrics, Linsley and her team set a desired goal. When the 2022 Arizona state session ends, she will compare the actual outcome to their goal in her legislative affairs performance analysis based on both bill passage and their ability to close action items and requests for information from legislators.

Impact: Less Time Entering Legislative Data, More Time Analyzing Legislative Data

Quorum’s custom fields allow Linsley to organize legislative information throughout the state session, Linsley can now spend more time performing legislative analysis and less time entering data, a huge win for her small team that depends on her to bring relevant data to help prep team members for committee hearings and meetings with legislators. “It’s allowing me to do deeper dives, do more work,” Linsley said. “As my boss is trying to delegate [work] between [herself and me], she's realized that I have the capacity to take on other work. It’s freeing up more time to do more of the heavier lifting for the legislative research work instead of just data entry.” Once the 2022 state session ends, the first session Linsley has used Quorum for, she will build ADEQ’s report on the team’s performance in achieving their legislative goals, including their response time to legislators and percentage of bills passed. [post_title] => Arizona Department of Environmental Quality Eliminates 50 Hours of Manual Data Entry Over Legislative Session [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => adeq-eliminated-manual-legislative-data-entry [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2022-08-17 18:44:39 [post_modified_gmt] => 2022-08-17 18:44:39 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.quorum.us/?post_type=resources&p=6841 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => resources [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [queried_object_id] => 6841 [request] => SELECT wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts WHERE 1=1 AND wp_posts.post_name = 'adeq-eliminated-manual-legislative-data-entry' AND wp_posts.post_type = 'resources' ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC [posts] => Array ( [0] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 6841 [post_author] => 12 [post_date] => 2022-05-24 17:37:43 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-05-24 17:37:43 [post_content] =>

Challenge: Over 1600 Proposed Bills Per Arizona State Session to Sift Through and Only So Many Hours in the Day

The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) is the Arizona government agency administering the state’s environmental laws and delegated federal programs to prevent air, water, and land pollution, and ensure cleanup. The ADEQ legislative affairs team promotes the interests of the agency to the state legislature through meetings with legislators, public committee testimony and communications with the regulatory community. ADEQ’s legislative affairs team depends on legislative analyst Roxanne Linsley’s ability to identify and elevate state bills that could impact the department. To keep the legislative affairs team in the loop, Roxanne hosts a weekly huddle with Executive Leadership where she brings new bills the department is running or that might affect the department to discuss and determine which bills to prioritize in the legislative affairs strategy, as well as review the status bills the leadership team agreed to track. Before Quorum, each time a bill dropped that was relevant to ADEQ, Linsley had to manually enter data into her tracking spreadsheet. For each bill, she entered: the bill number, bill sponsors, the date the bill was proposed, link to the bill text, list of co-sponsors, bill summary, and where the bill was in the legislative process. This manual process was time-consuming and inefficient, leaving her with less time to conduct important analysis of the bills. “I used to have to skim and find the bills and amendments as they were dropping,” Linsley said. “It was a huge amount of time, especially in January and February, at about 50/60 hours a week.”

Solution: Use Quorum’s Customizable Bill Tracking to Suit Your Legislative Analysis Needs

Linsley created sheets in Quorum to track ADEQ bills and set up custom fields within each bill to replace her former manual data entry process. “I really focused on using Quorum for bill tracking and presenting to the leadership team when we meet — here's where the bills are and here's what is happening with the ones we're most interested in,” said Linsley. Here’s how Linsley uses Quorum in her bill tracking workflow:

Set Keyword Alerts to Automatically Find All Relevant Bills

1,679 bills dropped at the beginning of the 2022 state session. Linsley set up keyword alerts in Quorum that automatically notify her when a new bill containing a keyword —such as water quality fees— is proposed, and each time it moves to a new stage in the legislative process. When a new bill containing a keyword is introduced, it is added to a tracking spreadsheet in Quorum. Sheets, Quorum’s integrated spreadsheet tool, are organized much like manual spreadsheets, but auto-update with the most current legislative data of the bills Linsley is tracking instead of requiring manual updates each time something happens to a bill. Linsley’s Quorum Sheet automatically collects information on the bill number, bill sponsors, the date it was proposed, and a link to the bill text. Linsley then adds the bill to her huddle agenda and includes the information from Quorum about the bill in an email to her team so they can review the bill prior to the meeting.

Categorize Bills with Quorum’s Custom Fields

After bills are added to Linsley’s tracking sheets, she brings them to her weekly huddle with the leadership team. During the huddle, Linsley runs each bill through a series of questions her team answers and enters their responses into the custom fields she set up in each bill’s profile. Each custom field helps the team stay organized on what stance they decided on a bill, how actively they chose to watch the bill and keeps them on track with action items assigned to team members, like scheduling meetings with legislators. These fields are also used to provide data for the various metrics the team uses to evaluate performance. Each bill has the following custom fields within its profile the team populates during huddle: ● Track Status: TBD, track and engage, track but don’t engage, check at the end of session, don’t track ● Stance: support, oppose, neutral ● Fiscal Notes ● Discussion Notes ● Is this an ADEQ Bill? ● What ADEQ Divisions (air, water, waste, mission partners, etc.) are impacted by this bill? ● When was this bill sent to the leadership team for review? ● ADEQ to Implement? The weekly huddles keep Linsley’s team aligned on which bills to prioritize in their legislative affairs strategy.

Log Interactions to Closely Track Speed and Satisfaction of Legislative Interactions

Linsley also uses Quorum to analyze the quality of her team’s interactions with lawmakers. She treats each inquiry from legislators on ADEQ legislative matters as customer service requests in Quorum. After a team member meets with a legislator to answer their policy questions, the team member fills out Quorum’s interaction logger with ADEQ’s custom fields. The interaction logger helps Linsley gauge the speed of their team’s response time and the satisfaction from legislators with their response. For each interaction, ADEQ team members answer questions about the interaction topic, attendees, status, urgency, and satisfaction with their department’s response. Gathering this information helps Linsley analyze how effective ADEQ is at resolving these requests for information and how quickly they are sharing information legislators need to make their policy decisions.

Gather Metrics For Easy End of Session Legislative Analysis

In the months before a state session begins, ADEQ submits its legislative ideas to the Governor’s office to get approval for their team to pursue legislation in the next state session. Once in session, Linsley keeps track of how many of the department’s bills are passed by the legislature. By housing legislative data in Quorum, Linsley can more easily perform legislative analysis at the end of the state session. This report evaluates her team’s effectiveness in getting ADEQ ideas into legislation from the approval process through the actual state session itself. [callout align="right" heading="Learn the Steps for Proving the ROI of Your Legislative Affairs Team" button_text="Read the Blog" button_link="https://www.quorum.us/blog/agency-legislative-affairs-prove-roi/"] The metrics in Linsley’s report on ADEQ’s legislative affairs performance will include: ● Percent of legislative proposals that are approved by the Governor’s office ● Percent of department submittal items included in the Governor’s budget ● Percent of bills opposed by ADEQ that are mitigated due to ADEQ action ● Number of times a legislator or staffer calls back before an action item is closed ● Number of calls/callbacks from a legislator or staffer requesting clarification For each of these metrics, Linsley and her team set a desired goal. When the 2022 Arizona state session ends, she will compare the actual outcome to their goal in her legislative affairs performance analysis based on both bill passage and their ability to close action items and requests for information from legislators.

Impact: Less Time Entering Legislative Data, More Time Analyzing Legislative Data

Quorum’s custom fields allow Linsley to organize legislative information throughout the state session, Linsley can now spend more time performing legislative analysis and less time entering data, a huge win for her small team that depends on her to bring relevant data to help prep team members for committee hearings and meetings with legislators. “It’s allowing me to do deeper dives, do more work,” Linsley said. “As my boss is trying to delegate [work] between [herself and me], she's realized that I have the capacity to take on other work. It’s freeing up more time to do more of the heavier lifting for the legislative research work instead of just data entry.” Once the 2022 state session ends, the first session Linsley has used Quorum for, she will build ADEQ’s report on the team’s performance in achieving their legislative goals, including their response time to legislators and percentage of bills passed. [post_title] => Arizona Department of Environmental Quality Eliminates 50 Hours of Manual Data Entry Over Legislative Session [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => adeq-eliminated-manual-legislative-data-entry [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2022-08-17 18:44:39 [post_modified_gmt] => 2022-08-17 18:44:39 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.quorum.us/?post_type=resources&p=6841 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => resources [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) ) [post_count] => 1 [current_post] => -1 [before_loop] => 1 [in_the_loop] => [post] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 6841 [post_author] => 12 [post_date] => 2022-05-24 17:37:43 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-05-24 17:37:43 [post_content] =>

Challenge: Over 1600 Proposed Bills Per Arizona State Session to Sift Through and Only So Many Hours in the Day

The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) is the Arizona government agency administering the state’s environmental laws and delegated federal programs to prevent air, water, and land pollution, and ensure cleanup. The ADEQ legislative affairs team promotes the interests of the agency to the state legislature through meetings with legislators, public committee testimony and communications with the regulatory community. ADEQ’s legislative affairs team depends on legislative analyst Roxanne Linsley’s ability to identify and elevate state bills that could impact the department. To keep the legislative affairs team in the loop, Roxanne hosts a weekly huddle with Executive Leadership where she brings new bills the department is running or that might affect the department to discuss and determine which bills to prioritize in the legislative affairs strategy, as well as review the status bills the leadership team agreed to track. Before Quorum, each time a bill dropped that was relevant to ADEQ, Linsley had to manually enter data into her tracking spreadsheet. For each bill, she entered: the bill number, bill sponsors, the date the bill was proposed, link to the bill text, list of co-sponsors, bill summary, and where the bill was in the legislative process. This manual process was time-consuming and inefficient, leaving her with less time to conduct important analysis of the bills. “I used to have to skim and find the bills and amendments as they were dropping,” Linsley said. “It was a huge amount of time, especially in January and February, at about 50/60 hours a week.”

Solution: Use Quorum’s Customizable Bill Tracking to Suit Your Legislative Analysis Needs

Linsley created sheets in Quorum to track ADEQ bills and set up custom fields within each bill to replace her former manual data entry process. “I really focused on using Quorum for bill tracking and presenting to the leadership team when we meet — here's where the bills are and here's what is happening with the ones we're most interested in,” said Linsley. Here’s how Linsley uses Quorum in her bill tracking workflow:

Set Keyword Alerts to Automatically Find All Relevant Bills

1,679 bills dropped at the beginning of the 2022 state session. Linsley set up keyword alerts in Quorum that automatically notify her when a new bill containing a keyword —such as water quality fees— is proposed, and each time it moves to a new stage in the legislative process. When a new bill containing a keyword is introduced, it is added to a tracking spreadsheet in Quorum. Sheets, Quorum’s integrated spreadsheet tool, are organized much like manual spreadsheets, but auto-update with the most current legislative data of the bills Linsley is tracking instead of requiring manual updates each time something happens to a bill. Linsley’s Quorum Sheet automatically collects information on the bill number, bill sponsors, the date it was proposed, and a link to the bill text. Linsley then adds the bill to her huddle agenda and includes the information from Quorum about the bill in an email to her team so they can review the bill prior to the meeting.

Categorize Bills with Quorum’s Custom Fields

After bills are added to Linsley’s tracking sheets, she brings them to her weekly huddle with the leadership team. During the huddle, Linsley runs each bill through a series of questions her team answers and enters their responses into the custom fields she set up in each bill’s profile. Each custom field helps the team stay organized on what stance they decided on a bill, how actively they chose to watch the bill and keeps them on track with action items assigned to team members, like scheduling meetings with legislators. These fields are also used to provide data for the various metrics the team uses to evaluate performance. Each bill has the following custom fields within its profile the team populates during huddle: ● Track Status: TBD, track and engage, track but don’t engage, check at the end of session, don’t track ● Stance: support, oppose, neutral ● Fiscal Notes ● Discussion Notes ● Is this an ADEQ Bill? ● What ADEQ Divisions (air, water, waste, mission partners, etc.) are impacted by this bill? ● When was this bill sent to the leadership team for review? ● ADEQ to Implement? The weekly huddles keep Linsley’s team aligned on which bills to prioritize in their legislative affairs strategy.

Log Interactions to Closely Track Speed and Satisfaction of Legislative Interactions

Linsley also uses Quorum to analyze the quality of her team’s interactions with lawmakers. She treats each inquiry from legislators on ADEQ legislative matters as customer service requests in Quorum. After a team member meets with a legislator to answer their policy questions, the team member fills out Quorum’s interaction logger with ADEQ’s custom fields. The interaction logger helps Linsley gauge the speed of their team’s response time and the satisfaction from legislators with their response. For each interaction, ADEQ team members answer questions about the interaction topic, attendees, status, urgency, and satisfaction with their department’s response. Gathering this information helps Linsley analyze how effective ADEQ is at resolving these requests for information and how quickly they are sharing information legislators need to make their policy decisions.

Gather Metrics For Easy End of Session Legislative Analysis

In the months before a state session begins, ADEQ submits its legislative ideas to the Governor’s office to get approval for their team to pursue legislation in the next state session. Once in session, Linsley keeps track of how many of the department’s bills are passed by the legislature. By housing legislative data in Quorum, Linsley can more easily perform legislative analysis at the end of the state session. This report evaluates her team’s effectiveness in getting ADEQ ideas into legislation from the approval process through the actual state session itself. [callout align="right" heading="Learn the Steps for Proving the ROI of Your Legislative Affairs Team" button_text="Read the Blog" button_link="https://www.quorum.us/blog/agency-legislative-affairs-prove-roi/"] The metrics in Linsley’s report on ADEQ’s legislative affairs performance will include: ● Percent of legislative proposals that are approved by the Governor’s office ● Percent of department submittal items included in the Governor’s budget ● Percent of bills opposed by ADEQ that are mitigated due to ADEQ action ● Number of times a legislator or staffer calls back before an action item is closed ● Number of calls/callbacks from a legislator or staffer requesting clarification For each of these metrics, Linsley and her team set a desired goal. When the 2022 Arizona state session ends, she will compare the actual outcome to their goal in her legislative affairs performance analysis based on both bill passage and their ability to close action items and requests for information from legislators.

Impact: Less Time Entering Legislative Data, More Time Analyzing Legislative Data

Quorum’s custom fields allow Linsley to organize legislative information throughout the state session, Linsley can now spend more time performing legislative analysis and less time entering data, a huge win for her small team that depends on her to bring relevant data to help prep team members for committee hearings and meetings with legislators. “It’s allowing me to do deeper dives, do more work,” Linsley said. “As my boss is trying to delegate [work] between [herself and me], she's realized that I have the capacity to take on other work. It’s freeing up more time to do more of the heavier lifting for the legislative research work instead of just data entry.” Once the 2022 state session ends, the first session Linsley has used Quorum for, she will build ADEQ’s report on the team’s performance in achieving their legislative goals, including their response time to legislators and percentage of bills passed. [post_title] => Arizona Department of Environmental Quality Eliminates 50 Hours of Manual Data Entry Over Legislative Session [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => adeq-eliminated-manual-legislative-data-entry [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2022-08-17 18:44:39 [post_modified_gmt] => 2022-08-17 18:44:39 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.quorum.us/?post_type=resources&p=6841 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => resources [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [comment_count] => 0 [current_comment] => -1 [found_posts] => 1 [max_num_pages] => 0 [max_num_comment_pages] => 0 [is_single] => 1 [is_preview] => [is_page] => [is_archive] => [is_date] => [is_year] => [is_month] => [is_day] => [is_time] => [is_author] => [is_category] => [is_tag] => [is_tax] => [is_search] => [is_feed] => [is_comment_feed] => [is_trackback] => [is_home] => [is_privacy_policy] => [is_404] => [is_embed] => [is_paged] => [is_admin] => [is_attachment] => [is_singular] => 1 [is_robots] => [is_favicon] => [is_posts_page] => [is_post_type_archive] => [query_vars_hash:WP_Query:private] => ef2b353da8a5ec2897d41c4f691980a7 [query_vars_changed:WP_Query:private] => [thumbnails_cached] => [allow_query_attachment_by_filename:protected] => [stopwords:WP_Query:private] => [compat_fields:WP_Query:private] => Array ( [0] => query_vars_hash [1] => query_vars_changed ) [compat_methods:WP_Query:private] => Array ( [0] => init_query_flags [1] => parse_tax_query ) )
!!! 6841
Case Study

Arizona Department of Environmental Quality Eliminates 50 Hours of Manual Data Entry Over Legislative Session

Arizona Department of Environmental Quality Eliminates 50 Hours of Manual Data Entry Over Legislative Session

Challenge: Over 1600 Proposed Bills Per Arizona State Session to Sift Through and Only So Many Hours in the Day

The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) is the Arizona government agency administering the state’s environmental laws and delegated federal programs to prevent air, water, and land pollution, and ensure cleanup. The ADEQ legislative affairs team promotes the interests of the agency to the state legislature through meetings with legislators, public committee testimony and communications with the regulatory community.

ADEQ’s legislative affairs team depends on legislative analyst Roxanne Linsley’s ability to identify and elevate state bills that could impact the department. To keep the legislative affairs team in the loop, Roxanne hosts a weekly huddle with Executive Leadership where she brings new bills the department is running or that might affect the department to discuss and determine which bills to prioritize in the legislative affairs strategy, as well as review the status bills the leadership team agreed to track.

Before Quorum, each time a bill dropped that was relevant to ADEQ, Linsley had to manually enter data into her tracking spreadsheet. For each bill, she entered: the bill number, bill sponsors, the date the bill was proposed, link to the bill text, list of co-sponsors, bill summary, and where the bill was in the legislative process. This manual process was time-consuming and inefficient, leaving her with less time to conduct important analysis of the bills.

“I used to have to skim and find the bills and amendments as they were dropping,” Linsley said. “It was a huge amount of time, especially in January and February, at about 50/60 hours a week.”

Solution: Use Quorum’s Customizable Bill Tracking to Suit Your Legislative Analysis Needs

Linsley created sheets in Quorum to track ADEQ bills and set up custom fields within each bill to replace her former manual data entry process.

“I really focused on using Quorum for bill tracking and presenting to the leadership team when we meet — here’s where the bills are and here’s what is happening with the ones we’re most interested in,” said Linsley.

Here’s how Linsley uses Quorum in her bill tracking workflow:

Set Keyword Alerts to Automatically Find All Relevant Bills

1,679 bills dropped at the beginning of the 2022 state session. Linsley set up keyword alerts in Quorum that automatically notify her when a new bill containing a keyword —such as water quality fees— is proposed, and each time it moves to a new stage in the legislative process.

When a new bill containing a keyword is introduced, it is added to a tracking spreadsheet in Quorum. Sheets, Quorum’s integrated spreadsheet tool, are organized much like manual spreadsheets, but auto-update with the most current legislative data of the bills Linsley is tracking instead of requiring manual updates each time something happens to a bill.

Linsley’s Quorum Sheet automatically collects information on the bill number, bill sponsors, the date it was proposed, and a link to the bill text. Linsley then adds the bill to her huddle agenda and includes the information from Quorum about the bill in an email to her team so they can review the bill prior to the meeting.

Categorize Bills with Quorum’s Custom Fields

After bills are added to Linsley’s tracking sheets, she brings them to her weekly huddle with the leadership team. During the huddle, Linsley runs each bill through a series of questions her team answers and enters their responses into the custom fields she set up in each bill’s profile.

Each custom field helps the team stay organized on what stance they decided on a bill, how actively they chose to watch the bill and keeps them on track with action items assigned to team members, like scheduling meetings with legislators. These fields are also used to provide data for the various metrics the team uses to evaluate performance.

Each bill has the following custom fields within its profile the team populates during huddle:

● Track Status: TBD, track and engage, track but don’t engage, check at the end of session, don’t track
● Stance: support, oppose, neutral
● Fiscal Notes
● Discussion Notes
● Is this an ADEQ Bill?
● What ADEQ Divisions (air, water, waste, mission partners, etc.) are impacted by this bill?
● When was this bill sent to the leadership team for review?
● ADEQ to Implement?

The weekly huddles keep Linsley’s team aligned on which bills to prioritize in their legislative affairs strategy.

Log Interactions to Closely Track Speed and Satisfaction of Legislative Interactions

Linsley also uses Quorum to analyze the quality of her team’s interactions with lawmakers. She treats each inquiry from legislators on ADEQ legislative matters as customer service requests in Quorum. After a team member meets with a legislator to answer their policy questions, the team member fills out Quorum’s interaction logger with ADEQ’s custom fields. The interaction logger helps Linsley gauge the speed of their team’s response time and the satisfaction from legislators with their response.

For each interaction, ADEQ team members answer questions about the interaction topic, attendees, status, urgency, and satisfaction with their department’s response. Gathering this information helps Linsley analyze how effective ADEQ is at resolving these requests for information and how quickly they are sharing information legislators need to make their policy decisions.

Gather Metrics For Easy End of Session Legislative Analysis

In the months before a state session begins, ADEQ submits its legislative ideas to the Governor’s office to get approval for their team to pursue legislation in the next state session. Once in session, Linsley keeps track of how many of the department’s bills are passed by the legislature. By housing legislative data in Quorum, Linsley can more easily perform legislative analysis at the end of the state session. This report evaluates her team’s effectiveness in getting ADEQ ideas into legislation from the approval process through the actual state session itself.

The metrics in Linsley’s report on ADEQ’s legislative affairs performance will include:
● Percent of legislative proposals that are approved by the Governor’s office
● Percent of department submittal items included in the Governor’s budget
● Percent of bills opposed by ADEQ that are mitigated due to ADEQ action
● Number of times a legislator or staffer calls back before an action item is closed
● Number of calls/callbacks from a legislator or staffer requesting clarification

For each of these metrics, Linsley and her team set a desired goal. When the 2022 Arizona state session ends, she will compare the actual outcome to their goal in her legislative affairs performance analysis based on both bill passage and their ability to close action items and requests for information from legislators.

Impact: Less Time Entering Legislative Data, More Time Analyzing Legislative Data

Quorum’s custom fields allow Linsley to organize legislative information throughout the state session, Linsley can now spend more time performing legislative analysis and less time entering data, a huge win for her small team that depends on her to bring relevant data to help prep team members for committee hearings and meetings with legislators.

“It’s allowing me to do deeper dives, do more work,” Linsley said. “As my boss is trying to delegate [work] between [herself and me], she’s realized that I have the capacity to take on other work. It’s freeing up more time to do more of the heavier lifting for the legislative research work instead of just data entry.”

Once the 2022 state session ends, the first session Linsley has used Quorum for, she will build ADEQ’s report on the team’s performance in achieving their legislative goals, including their response time to legislators and percentage of bills passed.

See How Quorum Can Help Your Agency's Legislative Affairs Efforts