We designed, architected, and developed the Legislative Scorecard as a SaaS model which helps advocacy groups add legislator scorecards to their websites in an easy-to-use, appealing format.
The Service connects to the BillTrack50 API, pulls in scorecard info (bills, scores, comments, and legislators), and displays this on the user’s website. We auto-populate everything, including official legislator headshots, to make this as seamless as possible.
The Issues
Manual Data Entry
Most scorecard services require a user manually enter in each bill’s name, description, score, comment, etc; making a lot of users take weeks or months to set up their scorecard data.
Services who don’t require manual data entry often restrict the scoring formulas of those organizations.
User Experience
Most scorecards are data forward and consider the user last. They’re more like spreadsheets than interactive, mobile friendly experiences.
Some scorecards are PDFs only, highly restricting efficient use on mobile.
Poor SEO & ADA Practices
Most scorecard Services give their clients widgets in iframes that they can use to add the scorecard to their websites. This practice essentially embeds the SaaS web page within the client’s web page as an entirely separate page. This does not provide any SEO benefit to the client’s website. It actually provides SEO benefit to the SaaS provider. Also, screen readers can not access the scorecards correctly, limiting the audience that can use them.
Our SaaS Solution
Data Architecture
We architected and custom built an API to handle multiple sources of data that automatically sync into the SaaS model and distributes up-to-date data to each scorecard daily.
This removes most of the manual data entry, reducing most user’s time spent by weeks.
User Experience
Our Nielsen Norman Group certified UX Designer worked to design the initial concept with the goal of being interactive and easy-to-use across devices. Since the initial launch, we’ve obtained qualitative testing from clients, legislators, and users. We iterate to implement the results of this testing to create the best Service available.
SEO & ADA Best Practices
We designed and built this so that it’s easily read by search engines because it outputs the HTML/CSS directly on the page, rather than in an iframe. We also structured the headlines and copy according to how search engines prefer to index it.
We put our software through ADA Compliance testing to ensure best practices. We also test it with our own screen reader to ensure users can navigate via keyboard.
Case Studies
This Service is used by both national and state based advocacy organizations, including: National Parks Action Fund, Americans for Prosperity, ACLU Pennsylvania, and the Idaho Freedom Foundation. For more info, view case studies.
The team at Revive was very responsive to our specific needs when creating our scorecard. They are constantly very responsive and on top of all of our requests. We greatly enjoy working with them and their great Service!
~Bev Stanton & Natalie Levine, National Parks Action Fund
Software as a Service Development
The Software as a Service (SaaS) model is an ideal format for businesses to scale and grow quickly. SaaS products need an experienced team that’s available at a moment’s notice. We know it’s important to keep things like: user testing, conversion rates, average order value, website speed, backups, and event tracking on your radar. These are the types of things we do on the Legislative Scorecard and we’d be happy to do them for you too. Contact us about your SaaS development needs and see how we can help make your Service more successful.
