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Subscriptions
What do you care about? What do you want to be notified about?
A
Subscription
represents "your subscribed interest" of a particular concept. Concepts that can be subscribed to are:- Bills
- Representatives
- Committees
- Lobbying Principals
- Tags
As described below, subscribing to a concept propagates any events related to that concept into your home feed.
At its root, subscribing to a concept propagates any related legislative events into your home feed. This means it will also propagate events into your organization's feed as well.
How this works depends on the type of concept being subscribed to.
Subscribing to a bill is the easiest concept to understand. Essentially if we identify a new legislative event associated with a bill, we'll let you know.
Good to know
Just because subscribing to a bill is straightforward doesn't mean it's the most maintainable strategy. If you really care about "all bills relating to Animal Rights", then you should look at subscribing to Tags.
Subscribing to a particular committee will alert you to all events of bills that the committee has reviewed. For instance, if the following is true:
AB1
goes through theAssembly Committee on Health
,- you subscribe to the
Assembly Committee on Health
then you will receive notifications for all legislative events relating to
AB1
(not just the hearings).Subscribing to a principal will alert you to all events of bills that the principal has registered for. For instance, if:
- The
Wisconsin Nurses Association
registers lobbying activity onAB2
- you subscribe to
Wisconsin Nurses Association
then you will receive notifications for all legislative events relating to
AB2
. Subscribing to a representative will alert you to all events of any bills for which the representative has sponsored or cosponsored. For instance, if:
Representative Darling
sponsored billsAB3
andAB762
- you subscribe to
Representative Darling
then you will receive notifications for all legislative events relating to
AB3
and AB762
.Subscribing to a tag will alert you to all events of any bills that have been associated with the tag. For instance, if:
AB4
andAB356
have been tagged withcarbon emissions
- and you subscribe to
carbon emissions
then you will receive notifications for all legislative events relating to
AB4
and AB356
.Much of the following documentation is reminiscent of this segment of Stanford University's "Marshmallow Experiment":

Stanford marshmallow experiment
Wikipedia
The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a study on delayed gratification in 1972 led by psychologist Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University.[1] In this study, a child was offered a choice between one small but immediate reward, or two small rewards if they waited for a period of time.
In short there is the "immediate gratification" of subscribing to a bill (which to be clear, is not always a lesser approach), and then a "delayed gratification" approach in subscribing to the more abstract concept that you actually care about.
For instance, imagine you are lobbying on behalf of the
Wisconsin Bear Hunters Association
, and a bill, AB53 relating to "shot shell restrictions and the hunting of fur-bearing animals". You could simply subscribe to AB53 and be alerted to related events.
-or-
You could:
- 1.
- 2.subscribe to the public hunting tag
Much like the marshmallow experiment, there is more work that goes into the second approach, but there is also a much more beneficial outcome.
By subscribing to the
hunting
tag earlier, you gained the following benefits:- 1.When another bill comes out relating to
hunting
as it inevitable will, and is assigned the taghunting
by an OurGov employee, a member of the public, or someone else, you will automatically be alerted to the bill's events due to the assignment of thehunting
tag. - 2.By assigning the
hunting
tag to AB53, it will show up in the Tag's page (example). This makes it valuable (and easy!) to see all the bills relating to a particular topic (or tag). - 3.We can also use this data for analytics, answering questions like:
- 1.which representative sponsored the most bills relating to healthcare reform?
- 2.who should I reach out to for a new bill on reproductive rights?
If you had just subscribed to
AB53
, all of the future benefits of the abstract concept subscription would have been lost.The following table describes best practices for when to use each type of subscription:
Concept | When To Subscribe |
---|---|
Tags | When you care about a particular idea, like "gun rights" or "loan abatement". |
Lobbying Principals | When you want to follow all the activity of a particular lobbying principal. |
Committees | Similar to tags, subscribing to a committee will provider a certain expectation of "subject matter" or a "concept". |
Representative | This is valuable for staffers and representatives that want to be made aware when a particular representative signs onto a bill, but otherwise is less common. |
Bill | This is still valuable to do, especially if the bill relates to a topic you don't normally care about but might for some reason this election. Subscribe to the bill when none of the other cases apply. |
Last modified 1yr ago