InstaTrac is a public affairs technology company serving Massachusetts government professionals. We provide legislative intelligence through MassTrac, municipal transcription services through MuniTrac, and a free aggregated newsletter called MassInsider that showcases Massachusetts political news.
Frequently Asked Questions
General
Our services are used by lobbyists, advocacy organizations, businesses, nonprofit organizations, municipal officials, government relations professionals, and anyone who needs to stay informed about Massachusetts state and local government.
Yes, our services focus exclusively on Massachusetts state and local government. We specialize in providing the most comprehensive and timely coverage of Massachusetts legislative and municipal activity, along with curated political news from across the Commonwealth.
Contact us to schedule a free two‑week trial of MassTrac and/or get a demo of MuniTrac. We'll provide onboarding support and training to help you get the most out of our platform. For MassInsider, simply subscribe on our website—it's completely free.
MassTrac
MassTrac is our legislative intelligence platform that allows you to track Massachusetts state legislation in real-time. It provides comprehensive bill tracking, custom alerts, and AI-powered search capabilities to help you stay on top of legislative activity.
We offer many different kinds of emailed alerts: the Daily Alert, the Daily Journal, action alerts, new text alerts, special report alerts, transcript alerts, and tracked amendment alerts. If you sign up for the Daily Alert or Daily Journal, you’ll get them via email prior to the start of each business day. The other alerts, on bills (and amendments) you are tracking, have several different scheduling options. You can opt in or out of these at any time, if you’re going on vacation or will be away from the office.
You can create bill reports from places all over the site – bill information pages, search results, bill tracks and committee pages (under the ‘Legislation’ tab). You can also compare any bill to any other bill (from the bill information page), and generate a scorecard on how legislators voted (from the ‘General Court’ page).
The MassTrac service is built on a series of very large databases. We do our very best to make sure that there are as few errors as possible, but some will sneak through – as they always do with such a large amount of data. When we learn of an error, we inform our customers right away via email.
Most of the active participants in the legislative process in Massachusetts subscribe to MassTrac. Our clients are business associations, agencies of government, lobbying firms, unions, advocacy organizations, and companies. We are proud to serve more than 380 organizations.
It all starts with the data, and ours (as explained above) is the most accurate that there is. Many other tracking services rely on web scrapers to gather information from the legislature’s site. We use a combination of tech and manpower to paint a complete picture of legislative activity.
We also provide more content than any other tracking service, and information you can’t get anywhere else: news and press releases on bills and legislators, summaries of every bill, summaries of every section of so-called “big bills,” summaries of proposed amendments, searchable transcripts of hearings and sessions, and more.
MuniTrac
MuniTrac is our municipal transcription service that provides searchable, clickable transcripts of local government meetings across Massachusetts. We take videos and agendas to create AI-generated minutes that cities and towns can use to comply with Massachusetts Open Meeting Laws. We also integrate with municipal websites for the ease of access to staff and constituents.
We take a municipality's meeting video and agenda, upload them to our advanced software, and generate a complete transcript with speakers properly allocated and timestamped. Our system also automatically generates meeting minutes, significantly reducing the workload for municipal secretaries.
MuniTrac helps Massachusetts municipalities comply with open meeting laws by generating accurate minutes in a timely manner and making meeting materials easily accessible to the public through web integration. This relieves the burden on overworked municipal secretaries while ensuring compliance requirements are met.
Yes, we provide web integration so both the public and municipal staff can easily access transcripts, minutes, agendas, and other meeting materials on a city or town's website.
MassInsider
MassInsider is InstaTrac’s free daily newsletter that aggregates and curates the most important Massachusetts and National political news. It’s your one-stop briefing on what’s happening in Massachusetts government and politics.
MassInsider is sent every weekday morning, so you start your day informed about the latest Massachusetts political news.
MassInsider aggregates news from Massachusetts-based publications, legacy media outlets, new media sources, podcasts, and political influencers. We curate the most important stories, analysis, and commentary about Massachusetts government and politics.
Click here and enter your email address to subscribe. You'll start receiving MassInsider the next weekday morning.