CQ+ FAQ for Current Clients
Below are frequently asked questions clients have about CQ+.
[/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”What is CQ+?…” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left”]What is CQ+?
CQ+ is a workflow tool designed to help CQ subscribers easily access the news and information they need most, combine it with their own information, and build reports they can easily share with colleagues.
What kind of features are included in CQ+?
CQ+ is a collaborative, powerful and dynamic tool that allows you to:
- Build bill reports, member fact sheets and newsletters that couple CQ.com content with your own analyses, which you can share, download to Excel, or publish with Word
- Collaborate with colleagues through project folders — annotate CQ content with your own notes that your entire team can easily see, contribute to and share
- View updates from your alerts in one centralized feed
- Create custom tags to easily aggregate and pull information by issue, bill, member and more
- Stay current — the reports you build will update dynamically as new information becomes available
More information about CQ+ features can be found here.
Do I need to have a CQ.com subscription to use CQ+?
Yes. CQ+ is a standalone platform designed to make a substantial difference in the work lives of people who analyze or track issues and bills.
It does so by harnessing the power of CQ’s data and analysis into an environment that allows you to add your organization’s information to our bill, member, committee or topic pages (and easily build reports off of that — and also share it).
To take advantage of all that, you need a CQ subscription.
What if I only subscribe to CQ HealthBeat or CQ BudgetTracker?
If your subscription consists of only CQ HealthBeat or CQ BudgetTracker, you’ll have full access to CQ.com during the “Open Access” period in order to experience the full value of CQ+, but to continue to use CQ+ after the “Open Access” period you would need to additionally subscribe to one of our CQ.com packages.
What is the “Open Access” period all about?
The “Open Access” period will begin with the launch of CQ+ on May 4 and last for 30 days — enough time, we hope, to allow you to experience how much more effective CQ+ can make you at your job. During this time, we are giving you access to all of CQ.com (that’s right, the whole shebang).
We think that CQ+ will be such a helpful tool that we want you to see what it can do within the context of the full breadth and power of the CQ.com platform. More details about “Open Access” are available here.
How much does CQ+ cost?
Pricing for CQ+ is flexible and depends on the type of subscription you have with us. For example, clients who use our Engage product to manage their memberships and do effective outreach to Congress would need to consider a CQ.com subscription in order to use CQ+. Contact your Account Executive to get specific pricing for your organization.
How does CQ+ work with the alerts I have set up?
Any alerts that clients set up on CQ.com will show results in their “You’re Following” feed in CQ+, including alerts set up through the alerts wizard, searches saved as alerts, and alerts set up by clicking or tapping the “Following” button on CQ.com.
How do I log in to CQ+?
You log in to CQ+ the same way you log in to CQ.com. In fact, CQ+ is accessed by what is called “single sign on,” which simply means that if you are logged in to CQ.com, then you’re also logged in to CQ+ (and vice versa).
Does CQ+ work on Internet Explorer 8?
No, alas. IE8 is a troublesome (and outdated) browser that only about 3% of our clients currently use — and, in fact, even Microsoft, which created and maintains the Internet Explorer browser, has stopped supporting IE8. Here is a link to Microsoft where you can download a more recent version of Internet Explorer.
What is the “Following” feed and how does it work?
“Following” is a stream of CQ content that we’ve provided based on alerts and issues you have set up on CQ.com by clicking on the “Follow” button. Clicking the headlines in the feed navigates to the items.
You can see the alert(s) matched by clicking the “information” button to the right of an item in the feed. Any follow or custom alert that you created on CQ.com displays in the CQ+ “Following” feed, and any “Follow” that a user creates in CQ+ will create a “Follow” in their CQ.com alert manager, with the same settings as a CQ.com “Follow” (emails items as soon as they are posted).
You can adjust your email delivery specifics for these “Follows” in alert manager, but “Follows” will always show up in the “Following” feed as items are posted. To turn off emails for “Follows,” you can visit the alert manager on CQ.com, find “Follow” in the list of alerts, select edit, and select “CQ.com results only” under delivery preferences.
This will allow the “Follow” to appear in your “Following” stream without receiving emails.
What is the “Notification Center” and how does it work?
The notification center is a widget that alerts you to important actions that take place in your CQ+ account. It operates similarly to Facebook’s notification center. It appears in the upper right-hand corner of a CQ+ account and displays a badge whenever a new action needs to be viewed. You will receive notifications if:
- A project is shared with you
- A project you own is edited by another user
- A shared project is edited by another user
- A page or item is shared with the user
- A user is @mentioned in a comment
- A bill you’re following passes, fails or is signed into law
Some notifications only take place in the CQ+ notification center, but if you share an item directly with a colleague, your colleague will also receive an email.
What are “Projects” and how do they work?
Projects are essentially folders where your can store CQ’s information related to an item your are working on. You can also use projects to automatically create reports. Projects can be shared among users on your account so that you can collaborate on initiatives.
What is “Sharing” and how does it work?
Sharing allows CQ+ users to collaborate with other members of their organization’s account.
With CQ+, you can choose whether to share projects, notes and reports with the members of your account. Custom fields and comments are always shared among your fellow account users.
You can also choose to share aggregation pages and news items with specific CQ+ users, instead of sharing with your entire team.
You can also share news stories to users outside of your CQ+ subscription: the recipient receives a link to a publicly available version of the article, which expires after seven days.
Once you choose to share a project, note or report with other members of your account, the other account members can edit the shared item.
Only the owner of the item can choose to make a shared item private again, and only the owner of an item can permanently delete the item.
When you share an item directly with a CQ+ user they will receive an email and a notification. When an item is shared with the entire account, the user will receive a notification but not an email.
What are “Custom Fields” and how do they work?
Custom Fields are metadata fields the you can create across all bill, member, topic, committee or vote pages, then use to delineate your specific data for that item.
For example, you can create an “Organization’s Stance” field with a dropdown list of options like “Support” and “Oppose.”
The field will now appear on all bill pages, and you can use the field to specify your organization’s stance on any bill.
CQ+ provides you with multiple data entry types to accommodate all of your metadata needs.
Custom fields also can be used in your reports. Custom fields are also visible to all users in the account, and anyone in the account can create, edit or delete a custom field.
What are “Reports” and how do they work?
Reports are dynamic, automatically updated information sheets that save clients a wealth of time and resources.
We currently provide four report templates: bill, vote, member and news. More report templates are in the works based on client needs.
You simply select the template you want to use based on the type of report you need to create. You can choose to manually select the items to include in the report, or have the report autofill with items you’ve saved in a project, or build a custom criteria query that fills the report with data based on parameters that you define.
When a report is created from a project or custom criteria query, it is automatically updated with items added to that project or query.
For example, if you build a query of Chamber=Senate and Party=Democrats, the report will generate each time to show all current Senate Democrats, not just the Senate Democrats at the time the report was created.
You can choose to export your reports to PDFs or CSVs, and we plan to add many more report templates and enhancements to report functionality based on client feedback from the field.
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