How do I make a hearing calendar for our bills?

A hearing calendar is a kind of status report. Instead of listing bills by status, it lists the meetings coming up, and under each meeting, the bills of yours that are on it. Each committee meeting comes with the committee's members, their phone numbers and email addresses, and an Email all members link, so your team can contact the committee before the vote.

Your organization starts with a shared hearing calendar called Next week's hearings, covering your tracked bills for next week.

Make one

Open Reports under Bill Tracking, choose the Status reports tab, then New hearing calendar. The editor has a live Preview beside it.

• Name: a name, an optional description, and Only me or Shared with all staff.
• Which bills: the bills to look for on calendars. It starts with your tracked bills. You can narrow it the same way as an advanced search, for example to one Issue Portfolio.
• Meeting dates: Next week (the usual choice), The rest of this week, Next days, This week, Last week, Last days or Between two dates. Weeks can start Monday or Sunday. Each run works the dates out again on the day it runs.
• Which meetings:
  • Tick the House, the Senate or both (your state's chamber names are used).
  • Floor calendars too: include floor sessions as well as committee meetings.
  • Keep bills taken off a calendar: still list a bill that was removed from a meeting's agenda.
  • Committees: every committee, or only the ones you tick.
  • List the meetings: day by day, or by committee, then day.
  • Committee members: officers and members, with phone and email, officers only, or don't list members.
  • "Email all members" puts the addresses in: BCC (members don't see each other's addresses) or To.
• What each bill shows: the same details as a status report. To start with: caption, sponsors, status, adopted amendments, your position, your priority and your position statement.

Choose Save or Save and run now.

What the report looks like

Day by day, each day lists:

1. Committee meetings, by time. Meetings without an announced time come last.
2. Committees that set the floor calendar, marked "Sets the floor calendar".
3. Floor calendars.

Each committee meeting has a heading with:

• The time, or Time not announced.
• The room, when known.
• The officers (chair, vice chair and so on) and the members, with phone, email and biography links, as you chose.
• Email all members, which opens a new email in your mail program with every member's address. If a committee is very large the link is left off, but the addresses are still listed.
• No email address on file naming any member we have no address for.
• Members not available for this committee. when we could not match the meeting to a committee roster.

Links appear on a meeting when they exist:

• Amendment packet or Adopted amendments, when your organization uploaded an amendment packet for that committee and date. The link opens the packet for signed-in staff only.
• For the U.S. Congress, a link to the meeting's page on Congress.gov.
• For floor calendars in some states, a Find your legislator link to the chamber's official member list.

Under each meeting, each of your bills is listed with a short note when it applies, for example "Deferred from March 17" or "Final calendar". Bills placed on a final calendar with no date yet are grouped together under their own heading.

Where the meetings come from

Meetings come from the legislature's published calendars as we receive them, and for the U.S. Congress from Congress.gov. In some states we also read the calendar placements written in each bill's history. Those placements give a date but no time or room. The lines at the top of each report say how many meetings have a time and what the data could not tell us.

Legislatures post agendas on their own schedule, so a meeting can appear, move or drop off between runs. Run the report again close to the day, or email it on a schedule.

Email it every week

Hearing calendars can be emailed on a schedule like any status report. The suggested schedule is Thursday at 3:00 PM in your state capital's time zone, so your team has next week's meetings before the weekend. See the article on scheduled delivery.

Formats and limits

The PDF always uses the compact layout. The CSV has one row per bill per meeting, starting with the meeting's date, time, name, chamber and room. A hearing calendar can list up to 1,000 bill-and-meeting entries. If yours would list more, narrow the bills, the committees or the dates.

If this does not solve it, email support@conservativestates.app and tell us your organization's name.