InstaTrac Celebrating 30 Years

InstaTrac was founded by President Michael Segal in March of 1994, built to serve government affairs professionals in Massachusetts. The goal was to create more transparency and knowledge in the Commonwealth, where elected officials and government stakeholders have the tools and data they need to make well-informed decisions. 

Michael, a former state house journalist, saw the inefficiency of legislative tracking in Massachusetts and wanted to find a way to make it easier to research bills. He knew he could bring clarity to the unstructured and disparate legislative world to ultimately help other government relations professionals better understand and act on the issues that mattered to them. In 1990, he and a small team of part-time workers created a database which housed all votes legislators had made. 

In 1994, the InstaTrac Limited Partnership was formed with the Phoenix Media Group and Michael. InstaTrac grew in its first years to include an online bill database, tracking capabilities with email alerts, and keyword searching capabilities. The company was a huge success and had 89 subscribers in its first year! 

After 8 years of partnership, Michael and the Phoenix Media group parted ways and Michael formed InstaTrac, Inc. Since then, Michael and the team have made InstaTrac into a nationally recognized leader in the bill tracking industry. Michael believes that leveraging modern technology such as machine learning and natural language processing is the key to providing transparency into politics. That guiding principle was just as true in 1994 as it is today, thirty years later. InstaTrac’s services and products power more than 360 organizations and 1,900 individual users around the state, from small nonprofits to state agencies to large corporations. With proprietary software, expert analysts, and AI-powered data, InstaTrac has seamlessly delivered the government affairs industry with the best tools to compete on Beacon Hill. 

What We Do

Here at InstaTrac we uncomplicate legislative data and present it to users in an easy and digestible way, offering three services.

MassTrac

MassTrac offers one of a kind features that make the lives of legislative professionals easier. 

• Side-by-side comparisons of all versions of all bills and budgets

• Live tracking of actions on all bills and amendments

• Summaries written in plain English on all bills, amendments, and votes

• Transcribed committee hearings, floor debates, and regulatory hearings

• A record of legislator votes beginning in 1995

• Lobbyist positions on bills for the session

• Directories of key State House contacts (i.e.: legislative staff, committee staff)

MassTrac helps you cut through the basic administrative work so you can focus on what you do best: advocate for your client or cause.

VoteTrac

VoteTrac is our political consulting service designed specifically to help candidates during campaigns. We provide comprehensive opposition research reports for incumbent legislators and other candidates, including data on biographics, voting records, legislative priorities, and other prominent information. Reports are scalable to fit every campaign and budget, providing you with an edge you can’t get elsewhere.

MuniTrac

MuniTrac is the newest member of the InstaTrac family of services, offering transcriptions and editable minutes of municipal meetings such as city council and school committee meetings. We convert video of events into a searchable and clickable transcript. Search for any keyword or click on a word and be brought to that part in the video. Additionally, we offer an AI-generated version of meeting minutes you can download and edit.

Looking Ahead

With the abundance of legislative and regulatory content available online to the general public, the primary challenge in tracking has shifted to efficiently managing its sheer volume. InstaTrac has adapted to this change by creating an intuitive and time-saving tracking platform that enables clients to receive highly accurate information at lightning speeds. 

InstaTrac continues to break new ground by offering edited and clickable transcripts of municipal meetings to cities and towns in Massachusetts. Our new service MuniTrac, has revolutionized municipal meeting minute taking. With the power of AI, we’ve created summaries of transcripts as well, giving users the option of reading a summary or engaging with a verbatim transcript. 

InstaTrac is the only legislative tracking service in Massachusetts and continues to be thirty years later. Today, InstaTrac is truly the culmination of client recommendations and the work of expert analysts.

Click here for your free trial and sign up for a tutorial to learn more about how we can help your organization stay ahead of the game.