Speakers: Joshua Habursky, Deputy Executive Director and Chief Lobbyist, Premium Cigar Association (PCA)
What sets FiscalNote apart?
Joshua Habursky: We use the solution because it really is phenomenal for integrated government affairs solutions. It allows us to track thousands of pieces of state and federal legislation as well as act upon it. I think what really sets FiscalNote apart is their depth and breadth of products offerings. We are able to utilize the tools in a very small government affairs team to cover a lot more ground and work and engage our membership from an advocacy perspective. So it's not only monitoring, tracking, but also the engagement mobilization. We've already seen, we've already seen incredible growth. Last week, we ran a campaign and we had 1,200 new advocates just from that one campaign. I think it's important um to have that integrated solution. And FiscalNote is able to really meet the task for our small government affairs shop.
What would you say to undecided leaders about FiscalNote?
Joshua Habursky: For folks that are considering FiscalNote but are on the fence, I would strongly recommend utilizing one of their tools — start out with something. We started out with the tracking and the FiscalNote option and we expanded to include other products from the communications tools, Knowlegis, to VoterVoice on the grassroots advocacy side. We are using multiple products but we started out with one. I think that it's, when you change software, it always can be a challenge. I think that that was the beauty of working with FiscalNote. It was a very seamless transition from our previous advocacy tool. And obviously as one of the, as the industry leader with the size and scope of FiscalNote they were able to transition us easily from one solution to the next. And we all obviously in the long run determined that it was worthwhile to use multiple suites of their products and expand it. I have always had a great working relationship with their team and I think the customer service and responsiveness is another added advantage of the FiscalNote team.
Could you describe a time when FiscalNote helped you?
Joshua Habursky: I think consistently FiscalNote helped us excel at being first and also accurate about information on advocacy. From the tracking angle, it's important that we get the information to our membership. We're able to process it as a government affairs team but we want to make sure in a competitive environment that we're getting the information out before our industry peers, before our adversaries on a policy issue. I think the consistency of FiscalNote has been important in getting through any roadblocks. To give one specific example, in Pennsylvania we were fighting an issue and the technology of FiscalNote and VoterVoice coupled together were able, for us, to get the information to alert our membership, to do our own action alert, and then also work with partner organizations seeing that they don't want to reinvent the wheel. They saw that the premium Cigar Association was able to put together a grassroots action alert effectively with the information. We then began working with some of these other stakeholders and our larger corporate members in order to get involved in an issue that's important to them as well. So we are obviously working with 50 state associations as well. So the the tool of FiscalNote and VoterVoice together has been important for us to be the industry leader from the grassroots advocacy perspective. But it all starts with the initial product and the legislative tracking. That 1-2 combo has been very beneficial in our organization excelling as the industry leader from a government affairs perspective and getting through any challenges that we may face.
