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Below is our recent interview with Anshul Amar, CEO and Founder at Unfold:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Unfold?
A: Unfold is a tech startup company producing an essential all-in-one government relations platform that collects, organizes and evaluates the overwhelming amount of information advocates need to weigh in on the legislation impacting their issues.
We unify CRM and monitoring features to put power in the hands of advocates, to help their voices be heard by policymakers. Unfold users can easily take action on issues and legislation that they follow.
Q: Who uses government relations software like Unfold? What does Unfold have to offer those outside of the government affairs space?
A: We have a pretty diverse client list — everyone from professional lobby shops in D.C. to small nonprofits at the state level. Law firms, trade associations, media outlets, and corporate legislative departments — basically anyone with a vested interest in legislative outcomes. Groups and businesses are affected by legislation too, so this is an avenue for them to find out what’s going on and speak up, get involved. Just because an entity isn’t political doesn’t mean they don’t belong in politics.
Recommended: Q: How is use of technology becoming more important in lawmaking and advocacy? How does Unfold keep up?
A: Thanks to technology and the availability of legislative, regulatory, and government data (the internet!), we’re able to bring science into the art of persuasion. Unfold is always developing new features and improving our current ones by taking advantage of new data sources. We use an advanced algorithm that generally combines historical information such as MOC voting and sponsorship history, a range of demographic and political factors, real-time news and social media monitoring, the number of days left in the legislative calendar, competing bills, etc. to determine which bills will move and which will die before seeing the light of day. The quantification of legislative data is still a fairly new concept but is already an essential component to every lobbying team as they make decisions on where and how to apply resources to progress their respective issues. This allows advocates to hone in on bills most likely to go somewhere, so then they can use our CRM features to focus on the human element, aka – the shaking of hands with lawmakers who need to hear their take on an issue.
Q: Can you give us insights into your features?
A: All of our features are geared towards saving our clients time and money and allowing them to stay organized in an industry that can seem incredibly overwhelming at times. With over 133,000 state and federal bills introduced each year, it’s important that advocates are able to know when new bills impacting their cause(s) are introduced and then track their progress through the legislative process.
Our features list includes:
• Bill, amendment and regulation tracking and notification: we find, monitor and notify clients of the bills, amendments and regulations most likely to impact their issues.
• Event notices: we prepare clients with our detailed legislative calendar of floor schedules, committee hearings, comment periods and more.
• Comprehensive updates: we send daily or weekly summaries of our clients’ campaign updates and changes directly to their inboxes.
• Bill passage predictor: clients can focus on the bills most likely to pass with our sophisticated passage predictor which enjoys over 96% accuracy.
• Smart Staffer Directory and Integrated Email Outreach: our clients are able to reach a multitude of legislators and staffers in just one click using our continually updated directory and integrated email platform.
• Custom CRM tool: users can track the time devoted to different clients and keep a detailed activity log with our customizable CRM tool – which we can also integrate with outside CRM services and portals.
• Real-time whip count: we can reveal which legislators are most likely and unlikely to support a client’s issue.
• Legislator media monitoring: we monitor legislators’ social media accounts and mainstream news outlets so clients can see who is speaking out on their issues in real time.
Q: What are the benefits of using your platform, i.e. how do you help advance the issues important to your clients?
A: Put simply, we can save our clients hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each year on research, outreach, and data analysis. Trying to do advocacy work without a platform like Unfold is just plain tedious and time consuming since there’s no standardized way that states/agencies/individuals publish information. Unfold users swap frustration and headaches for streamlined information and effectiveness. This enables them to employ strategy in their interactions with policymakers, since they have the full picture of what’s going on around their issues in legislatures. The result is less time spent for more effective policy advocacy.
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Q: What can we expect from Unfold in the future?
A: We’ll soon release some powerful new features that will make it easier to work with and analyze bill text. We will make it trivial to find similar and related passages from different sessions, states, and jurisdictions and to track issues as they move from state to state.
Looking ahead, we’re exploring the space of local government, and are seeking partners with a strong interest in city and county lawmaking. We also have a number of new data visualization tools to help our users explore industry trends and explain them to their directors, constituents, and other stakeholders.
We’re always looking for interesting partnerships with other companies, platforms, or governments. Some of our coolest and most useful features have arisen from discussion with clients or potential clients. We listen, and when they have a need, we devise solutions that work.
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